Jerry Martien reviews “The Blossoms Are Ghosts at The Wedding” by Tom Jay

The Blossoms Are Ghosts at The Wedding.Expanded Edition. Empty Bowl, Anacortes, WA, 2019, 249 pages, $20, paper.

The new collection of Tom Jay’s writing tells us there’s more to his work than we saw in the poems and essays of a dozen years ago. But only a little of that is more recent—instead the book goes back, wider and deeper. To the text it adds context, essential to our understanding of “bioregional” or “place-based” writing. Here it means a half century of life and community on the eastern slope of the Olympic Peninsula.

The knot of place also binds readers and book reviewers. I’m in a remote cabin in northern California, overlooking the Salmon River just before it enters the Klamath. My time here is a gift, an offer of a couple of days of rest after a long project. But when I was asked to review this book by a long-time friend, naturally I said yes, and as usual find myself swept along by currents larger than my life. The place is powerful, sacred to the Karuk people, and the occasion turns out to be both reunion and vigil. Tom Jay is in hospice, succumbing* to the long and rugged labors of his life—yet in “Salmon of the Heart,” the book’s newly added concluding essay, published nearly 40 years ago, here he is again.

He hears a doctor explaining how sperm find their way to the uterus.

I thought, “Jesus, salmon!” and knew I was one once. It was as real as this: I could remember the slow torture of rotting still alive in a graveled mountain stream. Humped up, masked in red and green, dressed for dancing, I was Death’s own delight, her hands caressing me…and this is the part I can’t remember; whether she wept or laughed as we rolled in love. [p 214]

Tom Jay followed salmon as part of a lifelong urging toward elemental sources. The last time I saw him, wearing his habitual beret and plaid jacket, he was on his way to a meeting carrying his constant companion, a duct-taped copy of Partridge’s etymological dictionary, Origins. People had gathered in an Oregon forest to talk about how we might save some connection between treasured places and the language we use to describe them. He would have a word for us.

 I first encountered Tom Jay’s work in three essays he contributed to Upriver Downriver, an occasional newsletter that circulated around the Pacific Northwest in the waning decades of the twentieth century. “Land, Earth, Soil, Dirt: Some Notes Towards a Sense of Place” arrived in rural mailboxes like long-awaited news. “Human awareness is the blossom in the fertile mix of two soils: the soil of language and the soil of place. The ‘soil’ of language is not merely metaphoric, it is mortally real.” [p 43] Our lives and livelihood are no less mortal. “When we speak of living here, we should remember that perhaps the most important thing we will do here is die here.” [p 45] The message gave back to the land a whole new meaning.

In “Larva,” while floating in the numbing cold of a neighbor’s lake he observes an emerging dragonfly. Its slow struggle from the water into sunlight and a new life, he reminds us, is the essential definition of beauty: “the marriage of freedom and necessity…. What the ancients called soul.” [p 55] What Tom Jay, in his life and work, sought to embody.

By the third essay, “Words Bear Nature’s Wisdom,” the watershed inhabitant and the lexicographer had joined in a fully developed thesis: “Language is an ecosystem; words bloom from ancient roots. We taste them on our tongues, re-inspire them with our breath. I imagine them as old beings reborn daily walking on thin air like thistledown, reminding us words are communal coals rekindled by our breath, blooms cajoled from roots by changing weather.” [p 62] Here and in the poems and essays that followed, the proof of his thesis is its constant return to sources. Even love, a love poem tells us, is not a rose but a root.

It was years later, when the first iteration of Blossoms appeared, that I learned what I might have guessed: Tom Jay is a dowser. “Finding Moving Water,” telling how he discovers that gift, remains at the new book’s opening and serves as a portal to everything that follows. To origin stories like “Beacon,” a visit to his grandmother and his first vision of womanhood when he walks in on her bath, then a first glimpse of mortality when she swings him back from an impulsive step over the edge of a cliff and he sees a dead fawn down there.

The dowser also leads us to the hard and literal labor of “The Well,” a long poem that unearths in its digging more than water:

A slow spinning dancer,
mole patient,
I sank in the graveled dream
by the labor of my hands. [p 154]

And as if the poet himself is a forked willow branch, he bends to everyday upwellings like “Walking to The Barn,” in the words of his wife and collaborator Sara Mall:

We duck beneath the breeze-supple branches
of a young cedar seeking the
open light of the trail.
Its green brushes us as we pass.
Mall stops and whispers,
“To be touched by a tree is a blessing.” [p 156]

And finally, constantly, coming back to salmon: “a manifestation of the power of the other side.” [p 235] Beside a creek from which the fish had disappeared, witnessing their return after a decade of labor by this indomitable couple and their watershed neighbors.

I close my eyes and dream of
silver-skinned elders,
the old ones, spent and
weeping in welcome
for the clear-eyed rain. [p 159]

My two days began by the woodstove, then moved out to a sunny porch overlooking the river. I re-read and remembered the poems and essays, then studied the additions. Besides “Salmon of the Heart” these include tales of wild youth, testimony on forest roadless areas, and two essential pieces of context.

At the center of the book a photo essay shows Tom Jay the sculptor working on Salmon Woman and Raven.  Black and white photos can’t do justice to this monumental bronze sculpture, neither in its scale nor the power of molten bronze. But like the book’s introduction by Tony Angell, a long-time friend and sculptor, it is witness to the embodied work of the poet and writer. Perhaps only a living salmon could better provide this evidence, or the splash of Chimacum Creek, or the sound of a bell.

“The Necessity of Beauty” describes the casting of bells as an analog to the forging of words. When the clapper (or tongue) strikes the lip of the bell, we literally hear bronze speaking. Much like the effect of a well-wrought poem, he writes, “a well-cast bell allowed a blossoming stillness in the wake of its ring.” (p 207)

Tom dedicated his final bell this fall, and Blossoms appeared shortly after, the beauty of his life’s work manifest in its ending: the mortal knot that ties us to soil, to the struggle of the dying salmon, the emerging dragonfly. “Death is a fundamental necessity, and the bud of inevitable death, our mortal awareness, tempers and weights our awareness so it rings the world around us like a bell, sounds its beauty.” [p 311]

At the end of the second day, as the November light is fading, I see two fishermen down on the river bank. It’s almost too dark to fish. The pool they’re fishing is hidden behind the toe of a mountain that descends steeply to the river. Later, my host will tell me that the Karuk call this ridge the stairway of the dead and have a song that gives directions to the otherworld. In this darkening hour, I will also learn later, Tom Jay is on his way there. When I look at the river again, there’s only one person fishing. I’m holding this book.

*  “Tom Jay, well known for his contribution to bringing summer chum back to Chimacum Creek, as well as for bronze sculptures and poetry, died on Nov. 10 after a battle with cancer. He was 76.”  (Lily Haight, Port Townsend Leader, November 25, 2019)

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Jerry Martien lives in the Humboldt Bay region and is the author of two poetry collections, Pieces in Place and Earth Tickets, and two histories of “primitive economics,” from wampum to weed.