The Impossible Physics of the Hummingbird by Kim Farrar
By Lauren Chase
From a central thread, the first stitch of a spider’s web, is built a lifetime. Close to that first weave is the whimsy of childhood. Spiraling outward, through age and experience, one’s concerns become vast, anchored by a primary core. Kim Farrar’s The Impossible Physics of the Hummingbird begins with a memory from childhood in which she and her brother find a spider in its web:
You teach me about creatures—
bright colors fatally tempt predators.
You flip a toupee of sod and twigs
to investigate what’s underneath.
A grub, so ugly and pale, in her presence
but you swear they make the best bait.
We eventually return. Forty years later.
I cannot write your eulogy when she reappears
with her spinnerets to offer me a thread,
says: Begin with this story.
The subtle hint of tension here, a venomous predator and its prey living between Farrar and the brother she cannot eulogize, tells us immediately that, though these poems hold the typical beats of sentimentality and grief of memoir poetry, there is something deeper and more difficult at play. The complexity of human nature is that it is riddled with contradiction: sentimentality can be bitter, grief may find us incapable of tribute, and in those we love there might exist something we wish not to confront. Each poem in this collection is a balancing act that seeks to hold two opposing emotions in the same space and do them justice, to communicate the paradoxical truths of our often-incoherent relationships.
The first section of the book begins with a meditation upon the loss of Farrar’s brother and their shared love of the natural world. From the spider’s web to the orbiting planets in our solar system, we are given a portrait of a complicated man who was nonetheless dear to the poet. One of the first poems that demonstrates their fraught relationship is “Calamities of the Natural World,” in which she wishes she could ask him about the Antarctic shelf and finds herself likening him to its steady erosion:
My brother with no proper bedding
and one dinner plate, but I tried not to judge.
You had to love him whole, you had to
love his whole slow falling apart.
Later, Farrar speaks about her mother who lives in a nursing home, aging into someone less recognizable—another example of a slow falling apart. In the poem “The Gift,” Farrar wishes to give her mother a crystal forget-me-not but the arrival date for the gift keeps being delayed. In their phone calls Farrar promises that it will arrive soon, but it never does and the calls are just a reminder of how distant her mother has become with age:
I’m often put through
to the same wrong mom
who tells me her sleeping pills
are red and smell funny.
It almost doesn’t matter
she isn’t my mother, I’m not
her daughter, I listen
with the same impotence.
Following that same thread of struggling to connect, Farrar speaks about her daughter whose autism at times makes communication difficult. The framework of what one might expect out of parenting shifts significantly as a child grows, each one distinct and complex with a whole host of reasons to worry and be joyful in equal measure. For a child with autism, in a world that was not built to embrace them as fully as they deserve to be, these worries reach new heights. In “Powerful Forces,” Farrar watches her daughter stare at the ocean and imagines what she might be thinking, how things exist from her perspective. She is verbally limited but Farrar still connects with her in the ways that she can and hopes society will do the same, will love her just as much:
All day we hallucinate dolphins in the ocean’s shimmy.
The horizon makes me feel like I’m a ghost in her future.
The sky is layered with shaded greys,
yet the entire scene glows,
my daughter’s hair is so gold, all I can think is—
Lord, look how beautiful she is. Lord,
let others love how she lifts her face to the wind.
Farrar’s struggle to find a tangible point of connection with the people she loves is a prominent theme in the book. She seeks to convey the convolutions of life, relationships, and people in her writing, never reducing them to cliches or archetypes, but painting them as they are in a specific moment. In the poem that features the book’s titular line, “Why it’s Hard to Write about My Brother,” she reflects on the various difficulties of representing her brother fully and honestly:
Because he could pinch open the beak of a baby robin
to feed it drops of milk.
Because he once touched me and I let him.
Because driving drunk and wrecking cars
was a form of apology for being a disappointing son.
Because I’d question the impossible physics of the hummingbird,
to spin the conversation away from his troubles.
Here, obfuscation becomes another form of connection. She uses the mysteries of biology, a shared passion, to cover up chaotic aspects of their relationship and the matter-of-fact statements about her brother to indicate the true depth of his character. In this way, Farrar is able to communicate an intrinsic paradox—that the good and the bad exist as necessary halves of a whole.
While some poets can make the act of imparting life lessons feel overbearingly preachy, hers read as more revelatory. She is not speaking down to her readers but rather invites us to share in her growth. In the penultimate poem titled “Cab Ride Home After Consulting with the Surgeon,” she is in the midst of her battle with cancer. She picks out things around her, mundane and unimportant, and realizes how much she loves them:
I didn’t know I loved
these potholes and the littered field
the possibility of imagining beyond
the night sky
I didn’t know I loved
each tiny cross in the screwheads
of the taxi door
or the muddy earth
streaked across the floormat
I didn’t know I loved
this ride
The poem allows the beautiful and devastating aspects of the book to find a personal meaning: you are in a car, constantly moving through space and time. You are not the one driving, but you know where you came from and you know there’s an end of the line somewhere. If you were in charge, you might have taken a different route and if you could control the cars around you, perhaps the road would be less treacherous. But here you are. You exist and so does life and all that is around you, every person, every pothole, every screw. You are connected to it all, the good and the bad and the in-between; and yet, you find a way to realize that you love the web, love this ride.
New Ohio Review 