**On tic, tic, tic by Heidi Seaborn**

by Tyler Truman Julian

Heidi Seaborn’s newest collection, tic, tic, tic, is a finely crafted inter-textual interrogation of our present moment and the challenge and promise of hope. The collection takes its shape across the four seasons and utilizes black and white photography, artistic and pop culture references, current events and personal experiences to explore how a woman engages with and navigates contemporary America. tic, tic, tic employs the confessional mode to assert that the personal is political and that hope is necessary for self-preservation.

tic, tic, tic presents a speaker that has entered late-middle age and is adjusting to the reality of this life stage—the sadness of children leaving home, a changing sense of purpose, the gained perspective of time and the task of parsing out one’s role in civil and political life as they age. The poems of the “Winter” section open the collection with a sense of despair; the cold, dark season frames poems that present emotional disquiet. In “Accidie,” the speaker emphasizes her unease: “I have lived a thousand days / like today the sluggish sky // dragging a finger through clouds. / So much silence—” Even in a period of her life marked by order and plenty, she experiences discomfort, explaining,

Clean dishrags creased
along the oven door

like white teeth.
I am no longer hungry.

Am overfed. Have fed the orchids
Ice. When I shift away

            from the sun, my faith cools.

           If I stay here long enough. If I long
            enough.

“Accidie” takes its title from the “eighth deadly sin”—acedia, spiritual sloth. The speaker feels a responsibility to do something but is unable to act. Having spent most of her life in motion—working, raising children—she can’t fully embrace the quiet reality of gaining time in her schedule. This sense of guilt is compounded as she looks out the window at the political situation in the United States. In “Winter 2020-21,” the speaker reflects on the days leading up to the January 6th riot at the US Capitol and struggles with complacency and sadness, while trying to strike a balance between political action and personal responsibilities in her household. She explains,

           I worry the dishrag, purge the cupboards, guillotine onions
           into stew because there’s still Christmas to stage—
            Bring me flesh and bring me wine. Bring me pine logs hither.
            We muddle our cocktails, muddle through— a toast Probst!
            to having survived and to all who—

            Listen! The first violin racing in Vivaldi’s final I’Inverno allegro—
            the pace quickening. Yes, something’s wrong. That restless—
            As the king rises from his shadows, dragging
            his string puppets, his mimicry of family, his rabble—
            Darkness and devils! Saddle my horses, call my train together!
            And then—the Bastille stormed by the king’s own men.

            …

           The king whisked away in his black armored car—
            Do I remember? Do you remember— Nothing?—
            Amnesia buttons itself like a three-piece suit,
            Wanders the marble halls looking for the broom closet.
            What have I forgotten? I can’t find my keys
            to the kingdom. A wall rises—

…

            And then it’s suddenly over, swept under—
            as we vagabond into hope—
            along the banks of the frozen Potomac.

This tension between action and inaction builds across the collection, as in “Summer/Fall 2022,” in which activists asking for support attempt to stop the speaker, who “didn’t stop—” and rationalizes that she is already “on their list.” But whether she didn’t stop because it “was raining” or because of activist fatigue, she still feels remorse for her inaction:

            I think of my granddaughter living in a state
            where a woman’s body is tethered
            to a stake. Sometimes a river defines—
            a border and all the residue

            eventually flushes—
            out to sea. Other times
            there’s no geographic order,
            just a cattle trail crossing a state line

The bleakness, fatigue, and near-despair of the “Winter” poems is interrupted and complicated by a sense of the forward progression of life. In “7 October 2023,” the speaker attends her son’s wedding and reports,

            I missed the news
            of the cross-border attack—
            I was dancing

            someone hoisted a chair—
            even as elsewhere, another morning was waking—
            to carnage

            to the reincarnation of—
            the past rotting in the future—
            in this puzzle of land.

            A land I thought I knew—
            Knew only dust escaping a beaten rug,
            a kerosene flame—

            attar and sage wafting off tea the Bedouin
            offered me for my endometrial pain—
            I have risked so little.

The speaker struggles to reconcile her right to happiness and fun in a world where so many do not get to experience the same. Yet, this struggle helps the speaker recognize the need for both on an angry planet. As the poems progress, the speaker leans further into hope which helps her understand her positionality in her family and community and the limits of her ability to change the world. While recognizing the beauty of Sainte-Chappelle and Vivaldi, she reflects,

Doesn’t it seem like every day the world burns to the ground—
as we silence the alarm—

            So certain: somehow
            tomorrow—
            persistent as fireweed—                                                                  (“On the Continuum”)

This poem—like many others in the collection— is sparse and, therefore, understated, yet the image systems it sets up betray its profundity. The progression from heat (“On the hottest day ever, I enter Sainte-Chapelle nave”) to fire (“the world burns”) to resilience (“tomorrow— / persistent as fireweed”) exemplify the speakers own psychological progression, her retreat into beauty and the past to find hope for the future.

The poems of the “Spring” section of the collection, take us deep into the speaker’s past, the proverbial springtime of childhood, and this recollection capitalizes on the growing sense of persistence in the collection as the poems slowly reenter the present. While this belief in hope is, at times, incomplete, the entry into “Summer” shows the growth of the speaker as she begins to find balance, using tools already at her disposal to engage the political and personal questions she confronts daily. In “Lookout,” she explores the responsibility of a poet to address society’s challenges, declaring,

            And I can’t outrun the news. It hardens into the landscape—
            like volcanic magma surfacing into oxygen. Is anyone listening to the frenzy—
            of poets except other poets? Did I mention the lookout near Twisp—
            was long abandoned. And how every season—a wildfire. What good does it do to
            kneel—
            before that destructive fire? To write the sins as if wringing the oil from a rag—
            before flicking the flame? Am I not praying—
            for a beginning while flecked with ashes from the end?

Even as the poet’s purpose explored by the speaker feels inadequate, the speaker can’t help but hope:

Yet—ah that quick tsk of hope—yet

the act of a tree shedding leaves is one of conservation. A gasp of exuberance,
before letting go like a salmon dying after spawning. (“Fishing”)

Trees drop their leaves, appear dead, to survive the winter. Salmon complete long and tortuous runs to spawn before shortly dying. Both are acts of resilience and both can model the type of resilience the speaker believes must be embraced in the face of unprecedented challenges. The balance the poet finds in her craft, relationships, and carefully chosen activism make her resilient and give her new life as she looks toward the future.

“Autumn” denotes the close of tic, tic, tic, and represents a settling on the part of the speaker. The only poem contained in this section is “Take Five” and references a jazz song of the same name. Listening to the song while driving, the speaker looks backward and forward and finds peace in the balance she’s found:

            As my email clutters with democratic emergencies, I play
            Brubeck’s Take Five on loop like when I was seventeen
            driving through green, green, green. Untarnished by sunlight.

            Listen to the drum solo. An enjambment.
            Off-kilter. Giddy. Like love.
            Yes, let’s say it’s love.
            Such an unstable, impromptu gesture.
            The rhythm hesitating—

            a syncopation, teetering.
            I plant a yard sign, phone bank, donate the small change
            of eighth notes. Each beat,

a brightening. Again the brush over drum,
shuffle, shuffle over cymbal.

I’m vowing to stay alive with the man I love—
as the horn sheds its clothing on the floor.

The poems of tic, tic, tic are real. The collection explores the reality of many who turn on the news first thing in the morning or begin scrolling as soon as they wake up. These poems should not be dismissed for their political focus; instead, they need to be engaged with. Everyone benefits from the empathy of experiencing someone else’s story. The personal struggles of one person moving through the 2020s are a place where we can build connection with one another, and the poetic impulses of tic, tic, tic only make that experience more meaningful.

In case you missed them—check out Seaborn’s poems from The Shore:
“After Life, the Carnival Begins”
“For my first marriage,"
"Cross-Country Road Trip"