Mosquito

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to the editors of the following publications, where some of these poems first appeared, sometimes in earlier versions:

 

AGNI
: “Mosquito”;
AGNI Online 2006
: “Kinematics”;
Alaska Quarterly Review
: “Last Body”;
Another Chicago Magazine
: “Tumult” and “Two for My Tumor”;
Artful Dodge
: “DNA,” “Other Good,” “Preface to Augury,” and “Swallowing the Scalpel”;
Black Warrior Review
: “Love is a Very Small Tsunami”;
The Bloomsbury Review
: “The Portrait My Mother Painted from My Mug Shot”;
Blue Collar Review
: “The Butcher Dreams”;
Butcher Shop
: “Fever” and “Graffiti”;
Cimarron Review
: “MRI” and “The Pleasure Notebook”;
CutBank
: “The Best Part”;
Denver Quarterly
: “Who Finds You”;
Florida Review
: “Rivets”;
Gulf Coast
: “Scaffolding”;
Hayden's Ferry Review
: “Happy Fun Sex Movie”;
Indiana Review
: “That First Day of Spring Kind of Feeling”;
Jabberwock Review
: “Plum”;
The Journal
: “Sophisticated”;
Konundrum Engine Literary Review
: “Goodbye Song”;
The Literary Review
: “Callnote”;
Naranjas y Nopales
: “After”;
New England Review
: “Having Been Roused . . .”;
New Orleans Review
: “Corpus”;
Octopus
: “A Country Mile of Soft” and “The Xylophone is Blaze”;
Pleiades
: “Cocoon,” “Juke Joint,” “Snow,” and “Step Up”;
Post Road
: “Below the Nearer Sky” and “Silt”;
Salt Hill
: “Fantastic Goes the Lost Cause”;
Sonora Review
: “Happiness”;
Swink
: “Ashtray”;
Tin House
: “Look Close”;
Typo
: “Mugging”;
Washington Square
: “Trembling”

“Physical pain,” Elaine Scarry writes in
The Body in Pain
, her brilliant examination of the intersection of suffering, language, and power, “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”

How does pain erase speech? First, of course, because the one doing the hurting is too englobed in the experience of hurt to make any words: hit your thumb with a hammer and it's as if the bone-deep intensity of that experience hijacks all energy from the mind; nothing can be seen or felt but the throbbing, blinding “this-ness” of that experience. As if there were nothing in the world but ache.

Throbbing
,
blinding
,
ache
: the relative paucity of the words themselves point to the second reason why pain eludes the saying. We don't have the vocabulary for it. English, which has an endless supply of terms for, say, getting drunk, offers the barest scraps to help us name the way we're ailing. Pain can be throbbing, stabbing, shooting, piercing, or burning,
and that's about it. Is this because intoxication is primarily a social experience, whereas pain is the opposite, always experienced alone? Words exist for the realm of the shared. Our poverty of terms for pain may indicate that we've given up on creating a lexicon, understanding that the solitary, suffering subject remains a solitary. When we are wordless, we tend to be world-less as well. What cannot be conveyed about the self and the body lodges stubbornly in either silence or “sounds and cries.”

But poetry is unlike other language, and its difference from daily speech lies in part in its relationship to those wordless utterances. Poetry bases itself in the sheer expressive power of vowel and consonant; rhythmic, bodily sound-making; moan and exhalation; the outcry that shades into song. Stanley Kunitz says that his poems begin in sound, and “sense has to fight its way in.” The music that lies beneath speech is a vehicle of feeling.

Perhaps it's this grounding in the physicality of language that gives poetry its courage to wrestle with the difficult, if not downright impossible, work of getting the barely sayable onto the page. Poetry's power exists in exact proportion to this attempt; the harder it tries to do what can't be done, the more beautiful and engaging its failure. Or perhaps better to say that its failure—the inability of words to be commensurate with the power of experience—begins to come out the other side, and somehow or other, through some feat of linguistic legerdemain, a poem is made that does what speech shouldn't be able to do. A miraculous poem approximates the character of subjectivity, how it is to be in the world.

Alex Lemon's “Other Good” seems to me a miraculous poem, one that locates a vocabulary for a near-unspeakable realm of experience. Here is its opening passage:

The poem's first and considerable accomplishment is to defamiliarize the hospital world: no familiar furniture here, no IV bottles and cranked-up beds with white-white sheets. Lemon's unexpected image-world immediately evokes the speaker's disorientation and ravishment, and the reader is swiftly destabilized and placed into a linguistic territory that is the result, at least metaphorically, of that “rawing” of the tongue; it isn't possible to speak in “cooked,” orderly terms here, not when
you're “starfished in sky / Spinning days.”

The poem continues:

It's a wonderful, unexpected turn, what those pillows have to say; this is no moment when we'd expect to meet an affirmation. But the flesh wants to live: the body's greatest imperative is to continue. That line and stanza break after “I couldn't understand this” is cunningly placed; it makes us read the line as a part of the sentence before and of the sentence below. In other words, I couldn't understand why I'd be happy to live, and I couldn't understand this “always being held,” the caresses, the engines and practices of care bearing the speaker through difficulty.

It's telling, too, how syntax breaks apart here, sentences growing shorter and shorter as the forceful verbs that are part of this poet's signature fall away. Now we're floating in a state
where time (and its vehicle, the sentence) has been atomized. “Wave song & useless. / Midnights & swearing. Blue.” In the depth of the body's night, we're suspended in mere fragments of speech, all that can be voiced here.

And now the poem enters its final moments:

No easy affirmation there; the speaker can't keep down, presumably, food
or
prayers. The light outside the window is itself dangerous; the world's a treacherous place, and yet the creaturely self relishes being alive in it. We're taken right back to the italicized passage, midpoem, with its key line: “
To death of life.
” Here the poem's central terms are placed in bald opposition, both linked and separated by the space/silence/caesura between them; they're the two poles of the world, the inseparable north and south of things, yes and no, one and zero.

What keeps this affirmation believable and vital is, of course, how realistically guarded it is; the speaker may be “
tickled / To death
” to be alive, but it's the knives that have the last word. Though here knives might be said to be good things; aren't they the instruments of the speaker's delivery? He tells us, after all, in “The Best Part,” that the “sweetest ingredient” of brain surgery “is the cutting. Hollow space / that longs to be
filled with what little I have.” Even that violation of the creaturely self has a beauty to it; the opening of the self points to the possibility that it might be filled with something else.

But it's not simply polarity that makes Lemon's poem an amulet and charm against the speechlessness of suffering. The harnessing of opposites is, instead, a characteristic of his style, which is the agency of his magic.

Style, that amalgam of the found and the made, the improvised and the adapted, can be the meeting ground between self and world. A means of self-presentation is forged, and in doing so the contents of individual experience can be signaled, given shape. The pain of others—just like their joy or pleasure or wit or desire—can remain entirely invisible to us unless it is given utterance, but plainspoken language generally fails to carry much of a depth charge. Not long ago, at a university in the north of England, a reader asked me if I couldn't just come out and
say
things; did I need the appurtenances of metaphor, the fancy dress of linguistic performance? No matter that to state how I'm feeling or thinking might take me a sentence or three, and not necessitate the several books of poetry and prose that she had neatly stacked on the desk in front of her, their pages marked with colored Post-it notes.