Bedroom Anthropologist
An anthropologist found a tape recorder
inside a white tree in Jakarta:
hours upon hours of a lost people
whispering secrets to the heart
of this plant. Across the night, the news hit me
in my room, where I have nothing
to tell a faraway person.
The tape picked up a language
we thought long extinct, a rain-dialect
encoded in the bamboo leaves
ancient man had fashioned
in ways Sony could never dream of.
I stay stunned for a month—ask
my ceiling. Soon I will need
to decant my emptiness
into the nearest clay jug
or World War II radio.
Failing that, allow me to mail myself to you
O sad and future human.
| Tom McCauley |
|
levelheaded: Bedroom Anthropologist
One of the umpteen million reasons we love poetry is because it has the power to connect people. Tom McCauley’s “Bedroom Anthropologist” is both an acknowledgment and manifestation of this ability.
In the first line we learn that people have long been recording, and other people have long been wanting to hear. We start out in what seems like a random place—Jakarta—then move to the intimate setting of the speaker’s room. En route, McCauley slyly connects his speaker who has “nothing” to the “lost people” who told their secrets “to the heart” of a plant. Lonely folks, those Jakartans.
Towards the middle of the poem the speaker considers the old tape’s language. It is a spontaneous eruption based in the natural world (“a rain-dialect”) rather than a mass production manufactured by the likes of Sony. The language the speaker couldn’t literally understand spoke to him in a way that left him “stunned for a week.” Don’t believe him—ask his ceiling. Lonely guy, that speaker.
Even given all its loneliness, “Bedroom Anthropologist” really is a poem about connecting. That quick command to “ask / my ceiling” brings us deeper into the poem. We are part of it now. When all the speaker’s “emptiness” can’t be emptied into an inanimate object, he turns to us. No longer demanding, the speaker asks in the penultimate line that we “allow” him into our lives.
Via an ancient people who documented their loneliness by gushing to a tree, the speaker realizes his own sadness. He offers himself to us because he trusts we can relate to him on this most basic level—because we, too, are sad. He sends himself in the “rain-dialect” of this poem. Devastated, we accept him gladly.
– The Editors
