Bagel Angle, a Poem of Dancing
“Y’all guys,” the Swedish rapper says,
“This song is a sad love song,
but if you don’t know Swedish, it can be
a happy love song.” Then: “It’s called
Shoot Me in the Head
With a Luger”—thus does he snatch away
the briefly-offered grace
of ignorance.
She proposes
dancing, and he wonders what
dance one does to Swedish rap. Swing?
Soon they were out of
joint, and he tried the other dance,
the nameless one he thinks of as Nihilist Spasm.
What dance she’s doing is not certain,
but the parts that he can feel–
a small hand, a bobbing shoulder—
tell him their two dances occupy
compatibly adjacent space and time.
Driving home, in a patch
of humdrum chat, they say
in perfect unison “Bagel Angle,” a phrase
surely
neither has ever said before, any more
than “Beagle Uncle” or “Brueghel Goiter,”
two cascades
of numberless catalysts and voltages
in their two different brains finding
improbably identical expression.
Do bagels, he wonders, even have
angles? The Platonic bagel,
or better, the space-bagel
in one of Einstein’s thought-experiments,
is a smooth torus, on which
a space-couple, dancing away from one
another at right angles
will trace out independent circles
until their spinning course leads both
back to the fixed point,
the origin.
| Roy White |
|
levelheaded: Bagel Angle, A Poem of Dancing
Like the work as a whole, the title of this week’s poem, “Bagel Angle, A Poem of Dancing,” uses humor to celebrate the idea of connectedness. When one thinks of bagels, angles aren’t typically the first things that come to mind, and yet, with their slant rhyme, the words find commonality. So goes the dance of existence. Things (elements, words, people) pair up, and their joining creates reactions upon reactions upon reactions.
Perhaps Roy White is out to show how the language—and the world at large—is bursting with this possibility for connections. As readers—and as human beings—it’s on us to focus on the ones we want to see. Do you hear the Swedish rap song as happy or sad? When you read the word “luger” do you think of the hip-hop producer by that name or a pro wrestler? A pistol or someone who sleds down an icy shoot?
Mystery lies not only in the strangeness of seeing two things paired that seem at odds with one another, but in considering what brings seemingly disparate things together in the first place. Take the Swedish rapper for instance. Something had to make him feel connected enough to the music to compel him to become a rapper. For concert goers, something makes his lyrics feel like they could be part of either a happy or a sad love song. For the speaker and his partner who utter “bagel angle” simultaneously, something made them speak the same words. That “improbably identical expression” is almost as weird as feeling close to a specific someone, and having that someone feel close to you.
– The Editors
