Emplumada

As the titular poem in Lorna Dee Cervantes’ debut full-length collection, Emplumada (1981), “Emplumada” serves as a kind of allegory for major themes within the book. The title of the poem provides the first instance of multiple meaning: Emplumada means “feathered,” as well as “pen flourish.” From the very beginning, the poet opens the door to multiple and concurrent interpretations. Birds are feathered, and many birds can fly. Plumage also suggests adornment—a beautification. “Pen flourish” may derive from when the most common writing implement was a feather. A flourish of the pen indicates a bit of fancy or influential writing. Writing—as well as birds, flowers, and human beings—can be both beautiful and strong of purpose.

“Emplumada” consists of 18 lines in three stanzas, two stanzas of seven lines and a final stanza of four lines. The lines are of varying length and are unrhymed. The first stanza placed the reader in time. It is the end of summer and the flowers, particularly the formally showy snapdragons, are dying. Leaves wither, “taking their shrill-colored mouths with them” (Line 3). When in bloom and saturated in rich color, the flowers “were still, so quiet” (Line 4). Dying, their color is loud and piercing—“shrill” (Line 3)—to the woman who observes them in their decline. They go out screaming, as it were. She hates “to see / them go” (Lines 6-7).

In the second stanza, the observer in the poem remembers when the flowers came into blossom, “when the weather was good” (Line 8). She notices a “branch of peaches” (Line 9) as it reaches above a nearby fence line, “daring” (Line 10) its way into view. The peach is a stone fruit with a hard pit at its center, surrounded by sweet and tender flesh. It bruises easily, and its season is limited. That it dares anything at all suggests an impulse toward being—a will to live, despite the risk.

In the latter half of the second stanza, the observer sees a pair of hummingbirds “hovering, stuck to each other” (Line 11). Hummingbirds are small creatures, and small is often equated with cute. However, the observer in “Emplumada” sees the supreme effort the birds are making, “arcing their bodies in grim determination” (Line 12). Hunting for food or procreating, the birds are solemn in their pursuit of “what is good” (Line 13). They are dependent on one another and dependent on whatever the earth provides for their survival. They do not make their own way but must forage from what already exists. What’s more, the bounty is limited, as summer will end, flowers will die, and whatever nectar there is will dry up before winter. Beholden as they are to the earth, however, by stanza’s end they are “warriors” (Line 14).

These fighters, according to the speaker, are not bound by the past but can distance “themselves from history” (Line 15). Feathered and capable of flight, the hummingbirds are free in a way the earth-bound are not. The snapdragons, rooted, will decline as the observer, presumably also rooted or tethered in some way, bears witness. The birds “find peace” (line 16), and the reader is left to wonder what peace, if any, is possible for the observer. The birds “contain the wind” (Line 17) and thereby master the element rather than be blown about by it. In the first stanza, the observer sees, and hates, to watch the snapdragons “go” (Line 7), for going signified death. In the last line of the poem, the hummingbirds “are gone” (Line 18), an absence that intimates an escape—if not from death, then from the seasonal, cyclical imperative of death.

To recall the other interpretation of “Emplumada,” the hummingbirds in flight, with their “grim determination” (Line 12), represent a metaphor for writing, and in so doing make “Emplumada” an ars poetica, or a meditation on poetry itself. The flight of the hummingbirds suggests the potential for poetry—and other writing—to lift, to alter perspective, and to affect change in the face of history. To flourish the pen, then, is to be a “warrior” (Line 14)—beautiful, perhaps, and also empowered with the ability to soar.

The end of the poem is not a call to arms, but an absence. The hummingbirds, as far as the reader is told, are an army of two. That the birds can “contain the wind / and [be] gone” (Lines 17-18) suggests that if they fight, they do so for their own survival. This impulse to live, and to leave, is its own form of resistance. With the lines, “These are warriors / distancing themselves from history” (Lines 14-15), the poet imbues the notion of history with violence. Violence occurs and recurs throughout history. There is violence even in the “shrill-colored mouths” (Line 3) of the snapdragons, who die screaming as summer cycles toward winter. How, if this is the course of “nature,” does one use the wind for one’s own purposes; how does one exit the cycle? Grow feathers, the poet suggests, and learn how to use them: Flourish.