Brendon Sylvester reflects on the “dark and shining” mysteries in the poet's stunning poems.
By Brendon Sylvester
J. C. Scharl’s Ponds is in turns rippling and still, murky and clear, dark and shining. Following on the heels of her verse play Sonnez Les Matines, Scharl’s first poetry collection interweaves the bloodiness of pagan myth with the mystery of the Christian faith (especially the kind of strange holiness unique to the Roman Catholic tradition) and the virility of the natural world.
Scharl’s poetry ranges from speaking as women of Greek myth, like in “The Newlywed” and “Penelope,” to intimate grapplings with grief at a mother’s death in “After the Funeral” and “The Circle.” But for all its breadth, Ponds repeatedly returns to the same tensions. Her speakers are continually caught between “trying to stay put” and “a calm beyond stillness” caused by “unending ripples / on the pond,” between the impossible desire to stay still and the peace that comes from change and repetition.
Scharl’s deft use of form pervades the collection. Most of the poetry is formal, but to Scharl form seems to come as naturally as breathing, and I often found myself entering the patterns of her poetry before noticing them.
The collection shares its title with one of its poems, but ponds and bodies of water are strewn through Scharl’s collection like the lakes that fleck the Michigan landscape where she lives. The “evening reflections on the pond” in “After the Funeral,” for instance, begin a series of replies to the speaker’s desperate questions at her mother’s death: “Is that all life is? A clearance sale? […] A scattered rose? A sigh? A squandered chance?”
Here and throughout the collection, death brings the speaker to a desolation that doesn’t dissipate but is met by the miracles of beauty and motherhood. “After the Funeral” (with the rest of the collection) sees grief as part of the living pattern in which death and birth, and light and darkness, continue to return to one another:
Yet—evening reflections on the pond,
and purple-veiled icons at Lent. Feeble
winter sunlight strengthens. Tiny sandals
by the door […]
In the dark, pinpricks of candles.
While Scharl’s ponds reflect beauty in time in “After the Funeral,” there’s an almost pagan darkness in them in “Watercolor.” After the poem’s speaker describes the “warming skin / of green and gold” at a pond’s surface and the “muscled brown” beneath it, she comes to a murky depth:
…[A] vast
swatch of a color that cannot be seen
but only felt, as on the day
when the pond was drought-shrunk
and I jumped in and was caught
knee-deep in silky muck, down
where there pulses the sweaty tender
underarm, under-breast
under-thigh of earth…
A dark, sweaty mystery broods at the heart of Scharl’s ponds, one that she compares with the veil of the Temple in the Old Testament and the damp warmth of the earth’s body. But this darkness in the “under-thigh of earth,” though mysterious and almost stifling, is alluring for the intimacy it offers. The paradoxical, blood-warm semi-shadow at the heart of the pond is, for its warmth and weird damp, , the “shade” that abides “beneath all others” at the heart of the world. The mystery at the bottom of all things is bodily and bloodily intimate.. Hence, the speaker longs “to breathe deep the wine-dark sea.”
In the penultimate and titular poem of the collection, ponds combine stillness, movement, sound, quiet. “Ponds” is Scharl at her best, a sprawling persona poem whose speaker is the violent and greedy King Theoderic, ruler of the Ostrogoths who reigned in Italy after Rome fell. Theoderic speaks his last words to his court scholar Cassiodorus, a philosopher and monastery-builder. Cassiodorus himself never speaks in the poem, leaving Theoderic to fill in his addressee’s silences with reflections and self-accusations.
“I know” says the King,
you recall that day
when at table I struck down […]
the rat-faced general from Ravenna
[…] It’s true,
we’d pledged peace, but it was putrid from the start…
what could I do but strike first?
This account begins a long list of self-described “brutal defense[s] of something good,” ambitious and violent acts that preserve much of the good of Roman civilization. But Theoderic then turns to the work of his servant and scholar Cassiodorus—the construction of a series of artificial ponds:
Such ponds!
As clear, cool, quiet as jewels,
brimming with shadows and light, with motion
and stillness, and the very sounds they made
were silence.
Theoderic has lamented his own inability, in the violent politics that defined his life, to “plumb the secret / space that hangs between sound and silence, / the two voices of God.” Now (while maintaining his tone of mockery) Theoderic recognizes that Cassiodorus’s “useless little ponds” have given him insights into the sound and silence of God that Theoderic doesn’t understand. In the end, his only release is to send Cassiodorus back to his ponds as Theoderic awaits his own death, and tries to:
… [F]ind
Some solace in that breeze; perhaps still,
as over the surface of your ponds,
in the stillness to which I go, it moves.
Scharl’s ponds are as mysterious at the end of the collection as at the outset. From watching and wading through them, one gains insight into the dappled mysteries they carry. They reflect serene evening light, and house the warm darkness at the heart of the world. Their ripples move through life and death, growth and destruction, but, in the end, come to a “calm beyond all stillness.”
Brendon Sylvester is an Anglican Christian poet and writer. He is currently an adjunct professor at Cairn University. He likes The Faerie Queene and hiking. And he is currently teaching himself the banjo and can play "wagon wheel" with moderate success. You can read more of his work and contact him through his substack.
All quotes from J.C. Scharl, Ponds (Cascade Books, 2024).