Fugitive / Refuge by Philip Metres

Our entrance into Philip Metres’ April 2024 poetry collection, Fugitive / Refuge, is a photo of the prow of a wooden boat looming against a backdrop of interwoven red thread strung with keys, a doorway into memory. In 2015, the Japan Pavilion at la Biennale di Venezia hosted this installation of Chiharu Shiota entitled, The Key in the Hand, during the 56th International Art Exhibition. 

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​​Artfully arranged to impart the sensation of movement, the installation features two boats tilted upward—open mouths inviting a torrential sky—to catch a cascade of red wool and wooden keys. Gathered by Shiota from the general public, these keys are meant to evoke the memories we collect in the quotidian that define so much of our everyday lives, as “the keys accumulate countless, multilayered memories that dwell within us."  Adjacent to the installation were included videos of small children detailing their memories from before and after they were born. For Metres, Fugitive / Refuge is the vessel and every poem within a key. 

In Metres’ poem entitled (with a tongue-in-cheek flourish), “Ass,” he takes notes on the de-coding necessary for descendants of trans-generational memories, which often contain holes that can only be filled in by those who came before:

“Speaking this tongue

is a house without a number, 

inheriting a key to the door 

that exists only in the I remember

of elders. Cross-references help

traveling from entry to entry.

In what country, upon crossing

the threshold of a home, would I

remove my shoes, remnants of roads?”

In “(The Ballad of Skandar II),” Metres states in a footnote: “‘Once upon a time’ in Arabic fairy tales, translates as ‘there was and there was not.' Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t.” Alluding to that which becomes mythological about ancestry when it is not our own experience and we learn of it second-hand, fashioning plot points and details to fill in the gaps to which we will never have access. Fugitive / Refuge attempts its own reimaginings of the Metres family tree to plant memory where none (for the descendant) may have existed before. In doing so, Metres applies the Arabic poetic device of the qasida across the length of Fugitive / Refuge, composed of three parts: (1) the nasīb involving one’s deliberation over the past, (2) rahīl involving one’s travails, and (3) a denouement that ultimately circles one back to some sense of a home. Fugitive / Refuge is thus composed of the three parts of the qasida, each section prefaced by a “Border / Manifest” and the overall work introduced by the poem, “Qasida for the End of Time” in which Metres movingly begins his collection in tender supplication:

“Maestro, steady my starlings.

Fo you I hunger. Lift your baton

And stuff my mouth with singing.”

For what is song but the tradition of oral storytelling conveyed through histories? What is song and storytelling, but poetry at its heart? And for how many of us do we yearn after a sense of the past, our rampant curiosity, wishing we too could be filled with the singing of ancestors carrying knowledge and legacy to which we are no longer privy?

“though I’ll have been long translated to

ash a phrase will effuse behind your eyes

without your knowing when it began

sliding down your spine swimming your restless limbs—

little glimmer. glint of warmth. winter ember.”

—from “Why are there stars?”

Just as the wooden boats in Shiota’s exhibit are deluged by the soft weight of memory, so is Fugitive / Refuge simultaneously inundated and anchored in place by the literal collection of artifacts Metres incorporates within his poetry to explore his family’s diasporic movements from Lebanon to Mexico to the U.S. Twice-diasporic, his family’s legacy is an inheritance preceding the crossing and spanning periods of rebirth. 

“to let the nib open. Black milk

his left fist smudges when he signs

his name. The ink spans continents

dives, unfurls its bloom.”

—from “Signature Strike”

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​​​Fugitive / Refuge is a powerful, multi-layered collection capable of recounting not only the past but reflecting as well the current state of the world—the displaced along the Gaza strip and the ongoing struggle of Palestine against empires and erasure. In his poem, “The Republic of Pain,” Metres states: 

“In they state, everyone has I, I, I

lodged on the tongue, a swelling pill

none can swallow. Windows turn out

to be mirrors. Even the trees

painted on the doors are frayed nerves.”

For those of us not involved in this daily struggle of constant survival by those in need, it is easy to look away and turn back to the comfort of everyday living. We are all overwhelmed but, as Metres points out, should this not unify us through at least the ever-humbling agent of pain?

On the front and back endpapers of Fugitive / Refuge are contained inverse images from The Key in the Hand depicting open doorways, doors left ajar, red thread woven as webs around the doorframes. Although the doorways are clearly bolted to the ground, the impression is of red thread holding it all together, creating permeable walls that ensnare the viewer within the space, a fibrous room as densely packed and porous as memory, even pock-marked. If memory is the story that became tradition over generations, then qasida is the song that then made it holy.
 

   https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-key-in-the-hand-la-biennale-di-venezia-japan-pavilion/gAVRFJ9xCfj3Jw?hl=en

Jay Aja / April 14th, 2025