Sarah A. Etlinger on Sandra Fees’ “Sunrise Pond After Sunset”

Let’s begin at the beginning, what’s on the page. The scene of action. What we know. The poem begins at a place called “Sunrise Pond, After Sunset” where there’s the speaker and at least one other person. There’s a storm, and they’re burning their “written intentions”. They don’t know where they’re going; the wind takes the scraps away. Above, an obscured moon; after, the “lovesick” peepers continue to trill and then the “starless hours open their silent eyes.” Night falls. The hours– not the stars!-- open their eyes.

A lot of anthropomorphism and likely metaphor. But that’s not what I want to focus on. Instead, I want to focus here on the two phrases that unlock the poem for me. The poem dances between awe and lamentation, which for me speaks to the middle-age concern of letting go while mourning what has already happened.

When the speaker declares “windgust and rainsplotch/ our hair cantillating rain/” I was immediately struck by “cantillating.” Immediately, I think of a cantor: the official in a synagogue who often leads prayer and chants/ sings the liturgical music. Who is singing? The speaker’s hair– (read literally)--which is made up of individual strands to form a collective noun. Rather like a congregation. Hair, in this sense, is both individual and community– the object chanting prayers to god, and the collective individual sense. For me, this opens the poem in two ways: first, the almost eerie element set by the first two lines allows me to suspend my disbelief that hair itself could conduct such a symphony, as it were. This leap –of faith?-- allows me to then enter the poem perhaps as the speaker does: “burn(ing)/ our handwritten intentions—/trust myself, care for my body,/ find a true path.” If the speaker is burning (her) intentions to trust herself, care for her body, find a true path, she is letting go, letting the elements like rain, smoke, wind, carry her; the way, in fact, those who pray also do. If you’ve ever sat among a congregation singing niggun, you’ve felt that blurring of individual and collective, that sense that you are no longer one, but also not only one.

And there is the link to the second phrase I want to focus on: “Above us, the one/ moon, obscured.” The “one moon”. I literally caught my breath here– what a rich phrase. On first glance, the literal again: the only moon we have. Reinforcement, awe. It is always there, above us, the one stalwart. Could it be a lamentation, then? Listen to the declarative, un-adorned diction that contrasts what comes before. It’s the bare fact. Could the speaker wish for more, another moon? More guidance? Clarity? See how the moon is “obscured”, perhaps from the smoke, the rain, the clouds, the sunset. Whatever it is, the speakers cannot know what’s above or ahead of them, though they trust it. Since they’ve burned their intentions, they’ll surely need help. Are they resigned to it? Or are they welcoming this change?

Can we ever truly let go of the body and our tether to the world? The closing stanza brings us right back to ourselves, with trilling peepers, “lovesick”, before “the starless hours/open their silent eyes.” No one is watching, finally.