Rebecca Valley on Hannah Azar Strauss’ “Warner’s Lolly”

A Walk in Warner’s Lolly 

In which I read Hannah’s poem and take a walk. 

There are two crows on that branch. I move and move again, along the creek, along the path, toward some unseen destination. 

It is not often a poem inspires you to walk. And yet I walk. The column of the poem like the path of two legs walking. And my legs, which bear me. 

In the novel Lolly Willowes, a spinster is driven by an unexplainable force to leave her sister’s stifling home in London and move to the village of Great Mop, where she sells her soul to the devil. She also goes for daily walks in the woods. 

You read a poem and then you read your day through the poem. For instance, I would not have thought, admiring the foam in the creek’s riffle, clotted froth. But there it is. 

And the clotted froth of clouds, which move in a line across the sky. And the sky, which moves in a line across the day. 

It is impossible to know the source of the whispering that drives us toward something, away from something else. And anyway, does it matter? On the bare branch, the ruins of some inedible fruit, which will one day fall to the ground and rot, and who will notice. 

In her book How Should a Person Be? Sheila Heti writes: “When we try to turn ourselves into a beautiful object, it is because we mistakenly consider ourselves to be an object…” 

Circling the watched day, I wonder: Have I made myself a prop in the performance of my life? 

Ahead of me, a man walks on the edge of the pavement as if on a tightrope, his arms reaching out and out. 

Then I entered a great theatre of clouds, moving thinly across the day. How nothing seems to change and then everything changes. My soul rising like cold air from the ground. And I thought: could I bear the words like a cloud bears water, heavily? 

It is not often a poem inspires you to walk. I went outside and found a Tremendous world.