Renacuajos
For Mia
Tadpoles — semi-quavers, quavers —
stray from the stave, assemble quivering,
grow larger every day. The puddle’s too small.
They come ashore like sailors after a passage,
their land legs having grown, all knee and elbow.
Metamorphosed, they can hop
over pebble, grass blade, a shard of glass.
The memory of music like the memory of swimming
recurs. A croak, then croak, a croaking,
and, finding one another, as night falls
a chorus gathers, tunes up, silence breaks;
or when rain patters through foliage or
it ceases and at once their pulsing ceases.
They squat under their leaves, they swallow their eyes,
they swallow stray fruitflies and again
in time make music, quavers, semi-quavers
(remember them). These creatures who were once
notation are themselves now music who arrange
when silence comes to be, when it will break.
The title of this week’s poem, Renacuajos, is the Spanish word meaning “tadpoles”. The poem is an elegy, though an unconventional one, in an as yet unpublished series composed by Michael Schmidt in memory of his brother. Schmidt says in a brief note that “two days after my brother died my great-niece (Mia), her parents and I went gathering tadpoles in the pools of a ranch near their home in Ensenada.” Reticent, playful, sometimes lightly instructive, the poem finds attractive ways of appealing to the young reader to whom it’s dedicated, without losing the underlying intensities of elegiac tradition.
Initially, the young tadpoles are imagined in the faintly humorous terms of musical notation, the quavers and semi-quavers which divide the crotchet (one beat) into half and quarter values. The analogy is visual but not only visual. Although “stray[ing] from the stave”, the tadpoles pick up a rhythm of their own, that of “quivering”, a nice echo of the musical term, quavers. They are fully aware and alive.
The poem follows them through their development, beginning with the surprise of a new simile. On dry land, they are compared with the human sailors who seem to move awkwardly (“all knee and elbow”) when they exchange the waves for the walkways. The incongruity of scale between the newly metamorphosed frogs and the sea-legged sailors registers humorously, but the poem goes on to look more sharply at frog behaviour, observing by contrast the hopping skills that unite them with their environment, be it grass or the intrusive “shard of glass”.
It might be that the following sentence (“The memory of music like the memory of swimming / recurs”) is not only about the frogs’ memory but the speaker’s and that of humans in general: it seems to shift the poem briefly to a more impressionistic style and level. At once, though, the “music” becomes the sounds the frogs make, the variously timed and pitched croaks which form a connective chorus. Again, they’re seen as intimately attuned to their environment, and their environment appears responsive to them (we’re not told that the silence is broken, but that “silence breaks.”) The poem’s fluid syntax at this point helps synchronise the pattering rain and its cessation with the frogs’ “pulsing” – a verb with further musical connotations.
There’s humour and mystery in the casually paired, comma-spliced actions of swallowing, where the frogs “swallow their eyes” and “swallow stray fruitflies”.
Then the creatures return to their “music-making” and the poem recalls its originating theme, of musical time in the form of quavers and semi-quavers. The young reader is exhorted to remember the names, so providing a foundation for the elegy fully to disclose its slowly matured vision: “These creatures who were once / notation are themselves now music.” The vision encompasses the transformation of music into a concept beyond notes on the stave and beyond organically created sound. The transformation surpasses the silencing that implies death, and ultimately suggests there is an empowerment of further metamorphosis, allowing time-bound earthly creatures to “arrange / when silence comes to be, when it will break.” In this new order it seems ultimately, in the hymn-writer’s memorable words, that “… death itself shall die.”
• Michael Schmidt is an educator, literary historian and translator. He is the general editor of the journal PN Review and the founder and editorial director of Carcanet Press.
