levelheaded: Arise, Dissembler

When the speaker in this poem says, “I touch my forefingers to my thumbs / to make a pair of glasses,” he tells us he wears a disguise. In this way, the speaker is as much a “dissembler” as the poem’s “you,” to whom we imagine the poem’s titular command is intended. Of course, our paraphrase wipes away some of the subtleties of Curtis Perdue’s lines—paraphrases always do—such as the important fact that the speaker makes “a pair of glasses” ostensibly to “peek / inside you.” The glasses are not only a disguise, they are also as false as the façade they’re intended to spy through.

This brings us to what the speaker imagines he would see “inside,” were his glasses to work. It isn’t immediately clear what “magnets pushing / other magnets around” means from a metaphorical standpoint, but it does seem to describe an internal turmoil that remains beyond the control of the poem’s “you.” And when these lines are read with the word “unattractive” in mind, the idea emerges that the relationship between the speaker and “you” is based more on their being pushed apart than pulled together.

The speaker takes this push-pull approach in subsequent lines, alternately suggesting positive and negative emotions with regard to their relationship. First, in a line that evokes the purity and verdancy (and nudity) of the Garden of Eden, we’re told the speaker and his “you” are “sporting our paradise skin.” But the following line tells us they are “grabbing at the salt in the air” as if they are trapped in a desert landscape. Then they are using their tongues “to pick / guitar strings,” making music together until it is revealed that theirs is “a song of blunted thorns,” which, after “paradise skin,” evokes the biblical crown of thorns that is supposed to have helped wash away Adam and Eve’s original sin.

Appropriate to its title, “Arise, Dissembler” (which is taken from a little piece of Richard III that concludes “though I wish thy death, / I will not be the executioner”) is ultimately about surfaces and the blows they often conceal. The homonymic quality of “dissemble” and “disassemble” comes into play at the finale of the poem, a quatrain of near-rhymes, in which a hermit crab’s disassembly from its borrowed shell provides a fine metaphor for the end of the speaker’s dissembling. And in the final line, as the speaker and “you” are reduced to “little mouths,” this speaker seems to concede that what we say, and what we do, is ultimately who we are, no matter what motives our actions conceal.

-The Editors