EXFOLIATING MY RESISTANCE
When I encounter those familiar flush-left stacks of lines occupying, on average, about half the width of the page or column in a magazine, I feel a momentary unease. I should be reading those lines, I tell myself, hesitating to turn the page. I once, after all, called myself a poet (but always checked the surrounding area for naysayers, expecting at least one).
No, I'm not about to explore the reasons for the unease. I know they're principally an unwillingness to focus, to settle down, to engage. But when I can let go of my own impatience, when I can meet those lines on their own terms, which to me are the only terms, I may come away moved or amused or dazzled, but also speechless. The language and experience of poems is so private, beyond thumbs up or down, beyond technique or form or topic, there's really nothing to say.
Sometimes there is such stillness inside a poem, trying to downshift into its sensibility isn't enough. It feels as though you have to take a hot bath, exfoliating layers, opening pores, before you can enter it. As here, in a poem from Sleeping and Waking, Michael O'Brien's latest collection:
UPSTATE
First raindrops, a
cat's footprints, the
wiper
opens its fan.
•
In a broken
dream I have
just met Lord
Byron, '30s suit,
cocktail lounge, Graham
Greene's opaque, intelligent
face, eyes that have
seen everything, a
spider's eyes, a
kind of banked
fury. What is
dark mops up
the light. I
reach for my
watch to see
where we are
in night's program.
•
In the night
bear climbs onto
the porch, a
clumsy sound, later
I hear him
come back but
it was thunder.
•
Stirred by the
least wind the
wintry, carrot-
colored willow.
•
A pickup
full of snow,
a crow's rau-
cous laugh, the
rapids comb-
ing its hair.
The satisfactions in this and poems like it are wisps of shared experience, rendered in a novel language we pick up as we read it, nodding in places and not in others, getting it and not. Sometimes--as in, "the rapids coming its hair"--getting only five words is enough.
I usually don't allow myself the time to remember that.