After illusion
After illusion clears, after its feral lure tames.
After exposed heights and enclosed depths shift,
what you feel is the body finally calm under moon
waiting to be known –
How adept you’ve become in your own
yourself, adjusted to what’s come to fit, shaped
to your thirst. While maintaining discrete distances at times
no longer a wall. After rote turns to puzzle to grin. Into small
spheres of exploration together, supplemented by ease. Now most
at home our own style. Singular and plural.
What love reaps –
| Karen Neuberg |
|
levelheaded: After illusion
From the moment any title announces itself we begin to form guesses about what may follow. A title has the potential to be very powerful and can act as a kind of instruction.
Karen Neuberg’s “After illusion” leans heavily on this notion. “After” is immediately understood as a time marker, but can also mean (among other definitions) in the manner or tradition of, or in pursuit of. Right away, since we’re dealing with illusion, we’ve got a bees’ nest on our hands. It’s one thing if the title refers to the time after illusion, post show. It’s quite another if the poem claims to imitate illusion.
The piece’s narrative seems to be between two lovers – a specific “you” and a disembodied first person. “I” never shows up in the poem: modesty or smoke and mirrors? The speaker notices that “you” feels “the body finally calm [. . .] / waiting to be known” after illusion “clears,” the poem’s pivotal third word. Is the work a meditation on awakening from love’s first stages of almost-shock, or does it ruminate on yet one more deception love might flourish?
Maybe our answer is in the last line, “What love reaps – [,]” which is the only stanza not a couplet. Perhaps this is the poem at its most transparent. What love reaps is what its lovers sow, be it clarity and light, or shadows and trickery.
The words “what” or “what’s” and “after” constitute a risky proportion of the poem: three and five respectively of the total 88 words. These key elements of the poem keep returning, “what” standing in for an impossible, more exact word, and, of course, always questioning. By choosing the loaded “after” and featuring it in her poem’s title, Neuberg prepares us for and delivers on a prismatic experience.
– The Editors
