Random reading

Packing books, I can't help myself. I open them. I sit and read for a few pages. I'll be doing this forever.

Since that's the case, I thought I'd try mini reviews (for lack of better term) of single poems, randomly selected from the books I'm in the process of packing. Or "readings" might be a better word than "reviews."

Because they'll be randomly selected, I suppose that might mean I end up with nothing to say sometimes, in which case, I will simply post them without commentary. Mebbe then you can review them in the comment box instead.

OK, lessee. Ha. This one's title seems perfect, given the nature of the exercise.

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A Great Number of Aribitrary Signs
Split Infinities, Rosmarie Waldrop
(Singing Horse, 1998)

And a deep discontent with variable waves lengths. The shining dandelions had already bloomed into puffballs. The air apparent, flickering with heat.

Light cannot turn corners. The stepp program of the pleasure principle. The splash of the fountain. Fingers on arteries practicing scales and arpeggios.

While concepts lay unobservable in the brain, the leaves began to fall. During the blackouts, the city gave in to the dark like any countryside. A wide space of hearing, but free from entanglements with fertile soil. And like lovers knew the time that was given and the time we must take.

The way the fountain braids my listening after sparrows, swallows and soldiers have been broken into phonemes. And the waves pounding the achievements that are wedged between our lives. One cup poured into another makes different animal ancestors.

What is important? The body of water itself? The sublimation that makes civilization possible? Mother lit candles and kerosene lamps.

Soap not necessarily a source of happiness. Marrow of water. A fountain's sound is changed by the slightest gap in the air.

Love draws its orbit through the heavens, while the land beneath heaves with calamities. I lifted the blind and looked down on the color of war, now lost. I might not have known all the meanings of red sky at night.

The light has turned the corner. When sublimation comes to rest the jet of water falls back on itself. As if the fountain itself were underwater. A sleep incautious and entire.

The title runs into the first line, so that it really begins "A great number of arbitrary signs and a deep discontent with variable wave lengths." Signs are recognized only by believers, so pointing toward what? A nature poem, that has the city in it, but a city subdued by darkness (the blackouts) and water (Providence has a river running through it, and a fountain, though maybe this isn't Providence). Providence as in divine direction, though, ties back to signs. The wave lengths of the opening fragment are light waves first, the visuals (dandelions, flickering air with heat waves (more waves, another sense), then sound (splash of the fountain, the likening of the water's music to an instrument). I love this sentence: "During the blackouts, the city gave in to the dark like any countryside." [During the blackout, a few years ago (long after this poem was written), that's not what New York City felt like in the dark, though I was surprised at how calm people remained. The lack of light/electricity (after the mass confusion first few hours/night) did also bring a hush I hadn't expected.] That sentence works like curtains, blanking the stage for the next scene, a miniature love story: "free from entanglements" omits but also includes the ghost of "romantic" and the "fertile" soil shores this up, and the "lovers" in the next fragment. Returning to the fountain, the arteries of water have turned to braids, and the voices of birds and soldiers (where did they come from? where are we?) are fragmented ("broken into phonemes") like the poem. More water sounds: waves pounding, liquid being poured from cup to cup. Then the poem turns, into questions, and in slips a memory: "Mother lit candles and kerosene lamps"--the light is back. The next fragment is of a favorite type: declarative and true, though still ambigious in implication: "Soap not necessarily a source of happiness." I'll agree. "Marrow of water" returns to the earlier "arteries" and extends the bodily metaphor--were the lovers before the city and the countryside, water a streaming exchange of fluids? Another note on the sound of the fountain, a gap, fragmented again. Then the heavens and the land beneath again eroticized, long-length vowels (love, draws, through) building to some internal semirhymes (land/calamities, beneath/heaves). "I" intrudes for the first time, or steps in to look out at "the color of war"--what the soldiers are for. Then sailors glide in with the "red sky at night" (sailor's delight, as they rhyme goes). "The light cannot turn corners" another seemingly factual statement that's also a retraction of the equally declarative "light cannot turn corners" above. But if the first is read as in physics, the second as the idiomatic phrasing of a qualitative change or turn in time, there's no contradiction. Then one last fillip of water's motion, the motion of the water underneath the water (no contra-directional), and then sleep, a straight (incautious = not meandering or sublimated) flowing line.