In the most recent New Yorker, Ellen Bass has a poem, “The Morning After,” about the morning after making love. “You stand at the counter, pouring boiling water / over the French Roast…” The poem sticks very carefully to concrete details when describing the current moment (sending kids off to school with their lunch) but waxes very poetic when describing the night before: “the little slice of heaven / we slipped into last night — a silk kimono / floating satin ponds…” The contrast of the two approaches gives a nice frisson. Then the narrator is so taken with the moment she can’t contain herself and bursts into a triple rhyme, three quarters of the way through the poem, which is another really nice little detail/trick. And it ends well. Good poem.
And last week, David Bottoms gave us a poem to take the breath away. “Spring, 2012.” Again with the little details to begin, and set the current moment, but then: “I can’t breath…my friend can’t breathe, either. / She’s lost her son to an IED.” And just after this: “tea waits on the table between us… / Impossible, of course, to talk about loneliness…” Note how when we go into the phrase, ‘Impossible of course,’ it seems to be about how after such a moment it’s impossible to drink tea, to live the normal details of life, but then the sentence going on turns us to our larger lives, to loneliness, to change. That dual use of the same phrase to illuminate the part before and the part after creates a sort of suspension, like the friend suspended in her grief, that makes the depths of the poem go on and on. A truly powerful poem. Oh, and a great ending, again seated in a very specific image.
Then, way back in the July 1 issue, Charles Simic gave us “The Dictionary,” about trying to find a specific word “to describe the world this morning…the way the early light / takes delight in chasing the darkness…” He makes this work work with the specificities as well, “wire-rimmed glasses / someone let drop…” and a fun ending. A cheerful little poem.
And Maxine Kumin has a meditation on the color yellow, “Xanthopsia.” Always fun to see how many ways we can approach an image, or an idea, in an original fashion: “the chrome coronas…tinge the towel…yolk-lick…it wasn’t sunstroke…” a Whitmanesque listing, though with a mildly gruesome twist that keeps this poem from being quite as chipper as Simic. I liked it.
Peace in poetry,
P M F Johnson