levelheaded: A Climate of Temperatures

This poem moves as through a funnel, tightening up powerfully the closer it gets to the end. Its title, “A Climate of Temperatures,” is the poem in miniature, moving through its own little funnel. We know what generally prevails, inclusively, to be a climate, where temperature is a specific measurement taken with reference to some standard value.

People talk about climates using the vague “it”: It’s a snowy place, it’s cold in the north, and so on. Interestingly, the poem’s sweeping, punchy fourth line “The Aztecs almost had it right,” uses precisely that word—it—and doesn’t elaborate on the referent. Then the poem launches into talk of the sun, and we can guess that the speaker is alluding to the Aztecs’ reverence toward that ball of fire, although other things, like human sacrifice, Mexico, and cannibalism, have by now connotatively worked their ways into our reading minds.

The temperamental sun, which creates “[f]ire and ice at [its] whim,” is now introduced. With temperatures, we’re talking measurements; we’re talking physical properties of warmth or cold related to kinetic energy. The poem has simultaneously launched and tapered, and logically so. We have narrowed from the general sense of climate to the sun, which is of course not independent of climate, but does remain broad in its being something we all comment on (a hot topic!).

Dexterously related to each other are those Aztecs and the breakfast appearing later in the poem—the big, morally complicated act of cannibalism is slimmed down to the beautiful “comfort in a life / already ripe with breakfast for two,” while both are about consumption. At the root of this eating is energy, the gain of it, which circles back to temperature. (Remember that the word calorie comes from “heat,” and it expresses the heat output of an organism and the fuel or energy value of food.)

Very notable in this poem are its sounds. Line two’s “still clinging to the glossy cloth / as I slip my nightgown off” says aw, ah—and awe. We have a “clamor of wonder,” and then a lot of hissing with “as chaos and tenderness / press their insistence against / the skin.” The end of the poem focuses on I/eye sounds: “a cry, [. . .] / slides through the cracks,” “I step from the bath.” You could say the journey gathered momentum from awe (a spectrum of feelings, including fear and admiration, held at once) to the final “I,” who in an assertive way steps from the bath and wraps herself, somewhat in control of her own temperature. This contrasts with the opening of the poem, where “I” feels and slips—the “I” at the end of the poem steps and wraps.

– The Editors