Next Time You Come Home

Lisa Dordal and Milly Dordal

Black Lawrence Press

September 22, 2023

$19.95

In her third book, Next Time You Come Home Lisa Dordal uses erasure, minimal compositing, and lineation, to distill the texts of letters from her mother, Milly, into a sequence of shorter poems bridging nearly 20 years of writings. Correspondence is, appropriately, itself a deeply integrated theme that twines the collection’s gentle aesthetic offerings to psychology and spirituality. In an opening essay, Dordal identifies a need to reconcile her mother’s doubling through alcoholism as one aspect of the work: “I loved my daytime mother. But in the evening, she disappeared” (6). In contrast, Dordal notes the way her mother, whose own early ambitions as a short story writer were thwarted by circumstance and discouragement, presents “something spiritual in her meditative focus on small, ordinary moments” in her letters and “comes across as being fully present” (12). 

The process of making these poems transforms the recovered letters from artifacts of a relationship into active spaces for its continuation. Similar to the experience of letters themselves, this process is both relational and self-reflective, the “correspondent” reader-writer both present and absent. Dordal’s editing process is an intuitive, aesthetic extension of this liminal space, allowing more subtle ways of encountering the poems. We are aware, for example, of the negative space around these poems differently than other poems, as a reminder of language cleared away in order to bring forward the writer’s deepest presence.

However, Dordal dissuades us from sentimental or oversimplified approaches to the work: “There are some things about the past—about my mother’s life and the relationship I had with her—that I have access to, but there is much more that I don’t” (10). Indeed, some passages of the letters are themselves ominous for their seeming unawareness of psychological overlap between speaker and object of gossip: “Tomorrow it’s Ghosts by Ibsen (at Court Theater). / Do you remember the restaurant we went to after shopping at Margie’s? / It has gone out of business. The owner got mixed up in cocaine” (24). In fairness, this is also an objective feature of gossip.

The content of Milly’s letters, however, is able to contain some of her other aspects: 

Just now, WFMT played “Blue Skies” by Irving Berlin—

his songs were what I grew up with. Happy songs

in Depression America. Yes, I attended Alfred’s funeral. 

He was 25. There was a bouquet from his fiancée.

I appreciate the letter you sent. You were 10 when I started drinking, 

maybe 9. I’ve put you through a lot of pain. 

The dried blossoms are from the mock orange tree in our yard.

I carry your letter in my purse. (15)

The second quoted line break highlights an acceptance of psychological tension and flux, as well as the ability to use history as a psychological mirror. Extended metaphor also bridges from the news of the funeral and image of the bouquet from the bereaved, through the admission about the suffering caused by her drinking, to the “dried blossoms” offered to her daughter, quietly connecting Milly’s observant social side with an honest self-evaluating voice and the maternal and relational instincts to make amends. Her gesture is metaphorical, not magical, an attempt at subtle presence from the tree symbolizing its roots, deepening the metaphorical significance for the leaves of Lisa’s previous letter in a way that begins to interconnect the living system of the collection.

Spaces for deeper psychological and spiritual possibility also arise from Dordal’s chiseling of juxtapositions:

Erik and Franz were in Chicago last week—

they received a warm welcome from their father. 

After no contact since ’74, no one knew what to expect. 

I’m wearing the gym shoes that you left. (17)

Here the leap itself constitutes the most important part of the communication, both evoking and attempting to cross the distance from the story of a possibly resurrected relationship to the subtle allusion: attempting to walk in another’s shoes. In the gap between story and statement we experience an inexpressible confluence of feelings and understandings, part confession, part expression of love, part attempt to reconcile, part poetic prayer that needed this relationship to call it into the world. The book invites us to reflect upon – within – such spaces not only between this particular mother and daughter, but more archetypally between people who love one another through overlapping difficulties. 

Milly’s humor and the poems’ associative playfulness provide compensatory buoyance, as in this use of embedded child story juxtaposed with a list of adult stories. The deeper implications about the precariousness of our constructed identities are balanced by Donna’s utter freedom of self-reinvention:

Did Kris tell you Donna Beeps—David’s imaginary friend—

now lives in Alaska? She’s left the drawer beneath their kitchen sink.

The day we drove to West Virginia was Pachelbel’s birthday—

we must have heard the Canon a dozen times. Everyone enjoyed 

seeing your pictures, hearing about your life in San Francisco—

the earthquake, the case of mistaken identity. (20)

The list of stories introduces another unique device, the way stories once shared between mother and daughter form omissions for the reader of the book, reminding us that we are perceiving only one presentation of this relationship: 

I’m sad your rent is so high, but having a living room—

and a bedroom—sounds like a healthy (mental) investment.

The sky right now is a beautiful mix of purple and pink.

I’ve thought lots about the Frederick Buechner quote you sent. (28)

The image responds to the literal affirmation of mental health with an aesthetic feeling of contentment, whereas the void Buechner expression tacitly evokes the way in which such feelings, though fundamentally inexpressible, are experienced in relationship of one or more forms. The movement between the two reminds us that image and text both require psyche as their interactive canvas-reader, another form of relationship equal parts ongoing and transforming.

These dimensions lend Milly’s own use of self-portraiture an imagistic quality of its own, in which we may see her both as she presents herself and as her daughter reflects upon this image within its familial and broader contexts:

I’m on the side porch watching the fireflies. 

It’s in the 90s here, with no rain forecast.

Monday—when Dad learned he no longer had a job—

was difficult. So much of his identity has been wrapped up in his work.

He can’t just stop and take up gardening and house repair. (38)

Milly’s image of the fireflies, her own self-image watching them, the clear night background, and her husband’s restlessness as context for her desired moment of peace all are gathered into the multidimensional image Dordal prepares, an image-making that models the deepening of the self-reflective practices portrayed in the original image. 

All of this reminds us of the transpersonal nature of the image itself, seen here from a different vantage. However, it also opens a unique window into the transpersonal aspects of the writing process. One thing poets sand other spiritual practitioners might reflect upon in engaging with this collection is the process of meditative editing that Dordal undertakes, in which transforming inherited material into art of both personal and wider significance and beauty has a reciprocal effect on the editor. Of course, Dordal did not undertake this work until after communing deeply with her own truth; the external and internal focuses by necessity intertwine. In fact, the transformations of consciousness taking place in these editing processes parallel Dordal’s own self-editing in some ways: “[M]y faith didn’t begin to become heartfelt until I came out of the closet at the age of thirty. It was only in accepting and celebrating myself as a lesbian—after so many years of hating myself—that I was able to begin to feel the presence of a larger love in my life…. God had been there the entire time, but I had loved God only with my head, not with my heart” (11).

Forming something more lasting by a process of mindful erasure necessarily requires and cultivates an existential equilibrium. Milly at times was aware of reflexes for psychological grasping and their resulting paradoxes of mental time travel: “I’ll give it to you NEXT MONTH. I hate to think that soon, / our long-awaited trip will be over” (51). The book itself quietly inverts the passing of time into something more like Dordal’s view of God through love: “Religious mystics speak of God as always being present: we don’t let God in; rather, God is already, and always, there…. Similarly, I now see that my mother’s love was there all along—even when she was drunk—and has continued to be present since her death” (11). On a remarkably common-sense level, such a worldview can only arise from much kind practice in relational reading…and editing.