the soul is a piano a list

of potentiating signifiers

pointing out the line between

this coffee mug and this

deck of cards. the soul

is a nest the soul is

rain on the submarine

the soul is the soul is

one hand trying to be two

thoughts simultaneously

rehearsing a part in a play

as yet unwritten but sensed.

the way horses standing

in the dark are sensed.

the tree was cut down because

the storm revealed its age

and its age said this tree

is not sustainable no eventually

it will fall or a branch loosed

in the wind will maim a nun.

so when the men came to cut

I wasn’t there I couldn’t

say so long thank you you

were my soul those early

janitorial mornings in which

I tried to keep up with so many selves

the air was swarming with selves.

I parked in my spot and no one

not a single person noticed

the juggernaut I was towing on this

rickety dolly boom squeaking past

the birds harvesting twine.

and instead of the tree the birds

find my ledge and sing this speechless river

looks hard as bark in the early morning

sun painting the smokestack

hard as bark. the birds take what

souls are offered. and though I know

this I press it against my skin:

to be alone enough on a Sunday

afternoon to listen to the wind

separate what leaves are left

from January trees as the sun sets

around seagulls come miles

from shore just to be here

as the sun throws up its hands

because I don’t notice the old man

at the end of the drive waving

at nothing because I’m certain

I know what weather is coming.

so certain I can plan into the aether.

I can plan right into the red

picnic basket and walk away

from it and lie down on the hillside

full of my loneliness. full of

the voices that canter about

what winter was and how

we boiled our survival right down

to this moment cresting like the hill

I climbed to get away from

the private madrigal in the mirror

posturing in recompense for

what wasn’t said on a picnic table

or in the expiring light of a stairwell

or at least met with distaste

by the looming statuary of the soul

as the train started sliding

and with it the world

I thought I’d caught

the vixen. but it pranced

through the smoke of a thousand

cigarettes and never came back.

In 2012, it’s tough to pull off the word “soul” in a poem. Yet, miraculously, in this week’s piece, Dan Chelotti uses the word nine times. The reason he’s able to do so while maintaining our interest is three-fold.

First, the speaker means what he says. Rarely do we encounter a poem with such urgency. Chelotti’s sparse punctuation makes apparent the poet’s need to speak. At the same time, this poetic technique melds sentences together so that their context is broadened and their potential meanings are, in some cases, made ambiguous. More on this later.

The second reason Chelotti can have so much “soul” is that the word is revisited time and again by the mind set on pinning down an ever-elusive abstraction. From the beginning the speaker tries to define the term: “the soul is a piano a list / of potentiating signifiers.” Given where the opening line ends, the soul is immediately defined as two things that are quite different—“a piano” and “a list.”

The fact that the speaker posits the soul as both a music maker and an organizing device complicates the first line. Moments later, the “list” is at once clarified and obscured even further. The list is one “of potentiating signifiers.” In a sense then, the piano and the list do have some common ground; notes on the piano are potential-making meaning-makers.

Continuing on in the poem, the piano calls attention to “the line between / this coffee mug and this / deck of cards.” The word “this” also proves itself to be a “potentiating signifier,” heightened by its placement at either end of line four. Perhaps “the line between” is meant to illustrate the complexity of the physical world where one can take a measured sip from a coffee mug (heft, aroma, taste) alongside the random governance implied by a deck of cards.

Chelotti’s use of imagery is yet another reason why he is able to explore this mystical topic. Not only do the images ground the poem in a physical world, but they also feed into the complex nature of the spirit. Take the lines “the soul / is a nest the soul is / rain on the submarine.” As “a nest” the soul is as modest habitat shaped in the natural world.  Exploring the soul in a line that is book-ended by the word “is” adds a mystical element to its definition. The soul is “is.” A line later, the soul is “rain on the submarine”—a delicate glaze on a heavy man-made construction, an image made even more interesting by the fact that submarines are at least partly submerged in and surrounded by water.

We’ve only moved through seven lines of the poem and already you can see how elusive the soul can be, especially when trying to be uncovered in the context of our limited language. The speaker never arrives at a suitable definition for the soul, but in the process of searching, in the process of writing this poem, a consciousness emerges, unmistakably alive.

- The Editors

For those of us used to poems written in a single column of text down the page, there is some novelty in this poem’s structure. Despite reading innumerable successful experiments, we often still intuitively expect poetry to run neatly down the page as sprung from a single musical throat in a single lyrical voice. (Just look through our own archives if you need proof.) So, it is sometimes exciting for us to consider why a poet would so obviously and dramatically switch it up.

Perhaps the most famous example of a side-by-side text is John Ashbery’s long poem, “Litany.” In his author’s note to that poem, Ashbery says his two columns of text “are meant to be read as simultaneous but independent monologues” (a great audio excerpt of the poem read by Ashbery and Ann Lauterbach can be found here). “Good Morning!” affords us no such author’s note. Nevertheless, “simultaneous but independent” seems an apt description of Behm-Steinberg’s paired stanzas. They give us a sensation of waking up just long enough to fall back into a dream. Those two sensations, waking and dreaming, happen simultaneously by their being oriented next to one another.

There is another explanation for the poem’s duality: the possibility of two separate speakers. We know from an early line—“My knee in the hollow of your knee”—there are two people in the poem. Later, ribbons of continuity run down either the left or right side of the poem. The speaker on the right is “resisting, commas, commas, resisting, co,mmas, Re,sis,ting c,omma,s,,,,,” until two stanzas later on the right s/he says “You tell me you’ve solved my punctuation problems. All of those commas, we’ll use them as earrings and troutlures.” On the left, the speaker tells us “Mary says I’m going to squeeze words out of your ass, and then we’ll have orange juice for breakfast!” A moment later the left-hand column refers to “the story about thirst.”

It’s never perfectly clear who or how many people are speaking. But even apparent crossover between the two columns seems to point to two separate speakers. In the fourth of the paired stanzas, the speaker in the left-hand column tells us “My thumb is a joyous crow.” Then immediately on the right we have “Lazily scratching your calf.” Does the “your” and the “my” refer to the same person? Is it the thumb that’s doing the scratching? Don’t know. But for a poem with such a cacophony of images, surreal sketches, choppy grammar, and symbolic dreams, not knowing is a big part of the fun.

- The Editors

Good Morning!

Mariel Glass’ “Winter Sequence” opens with a grotesque act—the speaker digging his or her “fingers into the flesh.” The violence of this line is softened by the enjambment that follows, as the second line teaches us that the flesh in not human flesh, but instead belongs to “night’s wound.” We are forced to let go of the initial image of fingers digging into flesh to consider the meaning of the phrase “the flesh / Of night’s wound.” Perhaps it refers to a “Honey-pale” morning in which “The webbing of the stars [is] torn / Out, again and again.” Or, perhaps night’s wound is the sky opening not for sunlight, but for star-like snow that “falls like the flapping / of a tigermoth’s wings.”

Tigermoth. Now that is a crazy word—at once a muscular predator and a fragile light chaser. In this singular word, as is the case with the first stanza and the poem as a whole, Glass does not give us a complete and consequently narrow narrative, but instead utilizes white space to foster individual interpretation. The poem has an airy quality about it, yet it is held together by certain consistencies. Each section is made up of three couplets set off as their own stanzas. All the lines are close to the same length. And, perhaps most importantly, the content of one section subtly echoes in the next.

The snow of stanza one reverberates in the “orchids from the air” of stanza two. The phrase “Honey-pale” from line two is morphed into “Muscular honeycombs / Of my dying, sorrowful brain” at the end of the second section. That beloved tigermoth too is conjured up in the impossible duality of “Muscular honeycombs.” Continuing this trend, section three is marked by sonic and metaphorical links to what comes before it. The sound of the “sorrowful brain” can be heard in “The snow is hollow to the touch,” and the visual image presented in this latter sentence is akin to an empty honeycomb. Emptiness itself takes new shape in the form of “the tubers [that] will push themselves / Out of the earth and give us life again.”

Because “Winter Sequence” is laced with complexity, Glass earns the right to a line like “There are real stars in the sky.” In this statement, the speaker reminds him or herself and the reader that, given all of the gray area that is open to interpretation, some things simply are, and, as such, are beautiful. It is not long after accepting with wonder the beauty of the natural world, however, that our speaker turns inward again. The hyacinths “obscure themselves.” Their fragility, the snow’s fragility, the tigermoth’s fragility, our fragility, represents “All that we grieve for.”

- The Editors

I

I dig my fingers into the flesh

Of night’s wound. Honey-pale,

The webbing of the stars torn
Out, again and again.

The snow falls like the flapping
Of a tigermoth’s wings.

II

I spend afternoons in the gardens

Of the sanatorium,

Picking orchids from the air;
Peeling away the

Muscular honeycombs
Of my dying, sorrowful brain.

III

The snow is hollow to the touch. Things are

So beautiful here in the mountains.

In the spring the tubers will push themselves
Out of the earth and give us life again,

The way butterflies dream of next year’s wings-
So obscene and lovely, pulled apart in the hands.

IV

I am winter-broken,

The tendon of life severed

And curled back into the muscle.
Now I lay at the navel of the earth

Unwrinkled like a child;
There are real stars in the sky

V

In the spring hyacinths will bloom

In the white hills, and

Obscure themselves,
Because they are so fragile,

The pale petals, and dead nightingales;
All that we grieve for.

Music came first, an unbroken pure tone

passing over the smooth surface of clay, how long

no way to count, until ripples

ridged the clay, and the music found them

and began to rise and fall, billions and billions

of times (call them years), until buds

extended, became digits, pushing

up from the clay, wriggling,

swaying side to side, all moving together,

a metronome, marking the rising

and falling tones, billions upon billions,

highs growing infinitesimally

further from lows. Then four

fingers, as they had become, held back

behind the tone, waved response

to another four, neither a hand yet.

The waving fingers began to break

ranks, waggle to each other. New patterns

made for shifting air currents; the tones changed,

more rapidly now, a million years, now half

a million, more, less, with rapid

irregularity, and the second group

of fingers began to tap the clay

they had sprung from. The tones absorbed the taps

for a while, then moved with them,

propelled by them, pushed this way and that,

and rhythms came into the void,

four fingers tapping, four dancing,

contrapuntal, infinite variety

which needs nothing more than itself, and could have

gone on forever, but that the fingers

pushed further out of the clay, a new nub appeared,

became a thumb, and pushed against the fingers

sounding a snap in air: a beat.

The dancing fingers loved

the beat; they moved with it,

around it, against it. Mostly,

it propelled them, they stretched upward,

pushing through clay, they became hands,

then wrists, then arms that jointed, and would have

jointed again, but that shoulders

grew out and stopped them. But the beat

went on, and the hands were drawn

back to the clay, the music pulsed

around them, the notes were blue,

the rhythms syncopated, and this

was happening all over now, shoulders,

arms, hands from the clay,

back to it, and the clay growing soft

and malleable where the hands

and the music touched it. The hands

began modeling, some pulling it up,

and up, some making finger-width grooves, fingers

probing inside the grooves, until the music

and the hands and the new shapes

made the clay moist and fecund, and

algae grew, and sporangia.

At its simplest, this poem weaves together two separate processes: the evolution of music and the development of a human arm.

The first line of the poem tells us, “Music came first.” From this beginning, the word “music” and a description of music as “an unbroken pure tone” present music as fully developed concept. For the speaker, music’s existence is not reliant upon human ability to create it; it precedes us. Then “[n]ew patterns” develop. The same music that exists while we’re just a “smooth surface of clay” is supplemented by “four fingers tapping, four dancing, / contrapuntal.” The very clay from which we are created can be molded, “growing soft / and malleable where the hands / and the music touched it.” Music may come first, but by the end of the poem, by the time the poem’s increasing complexity leads to “algae” and “sporangia,” music and the creative clay hands have become interdependent.  The “beat” from the end of the second stanza can only be heard after “a new nub appeared, / became a thumb, and pushed against the fingers.” The new “grooves” at the end of the poem are, unsurprisingly, “finger-width.” The big picture here is that music (and all art, really) is inseparable from human physiology. Even if “an unbroken pure tone” existed before humans, it developed alongside us into true music.

All this is handled quite deftly. There are some nice touches, like the rhythm and rhyme of “But the beat / went on, and the hands were drawn” in which the language simulates the actual beat while playing on the word “drawn.”  The phrase, “The tones absorbed the taps,” similarly uses the sounds of “tone” and “tap” to enact the absorption.  But there is also something else going on in the poem, something harder to pinpoint.

The evolution of music and the development of a limb would seem most at home in a history paper or a scientific dissertation. Instead, we have them tied together in a poem. There is something mysterious about the way music just is. There is something magical, even religious, in the animation of the clay. And there is something confoundedly figurative about all this mysticism, as if “music” and “clay” are meant as stand-ins for any number of interdependent concepts. If we gathered all the science and history ever written, there would still be some big holes in our understanding of what it’s like to see the world as a human, and to be sure, there are big holes even when we throw poetry into the mix, but this poem’s attempt to build upon these ideas with deeply expressive language and emotion seems, to us, worth the effort.

-The Editors

While light held I watched for air mass boundaries,

sunspots, cops behind median bushes,

tried to breathe calmly through my spiracles.

The newest models of cars,

the ancestral gasp of the woman sleeping next to me.

I tried imagining the pillow and cradle topography

surrounding the small New England churchyard

where her ancestors are buried,

the pin and feathered stonewalls.

People may give you pictures of yourself that they took

or show you how to highlight the text and drag it.

They may try to teach you the difference

between each of the 16 quarter winds.

Like Uncle Harold, how proud he was

when he bought his first 20-foot extension ladder.

Somewhere in the middle crease

you find yourself walking into all 32 winds at once.

As evening comes, a stigmatized halo

around each white and amber light.

You could read Daniel Hales’ “How To Make Friends” several times without quite grasping the connection between the first and second stanza. The stanzas aren’t paired up with an in-your-face logic. The dominant pronoun shifts from “I” to “you.” Most notably, there’s no clear-cut connection between the events thathappened in the first stanza and what may happen in the second.

In the first stanza, the speaker’s actions seem to have occurred in the context of failure: “While light held I watched for air mass boundaries, / sunspots, cops behind median bushes, / tried to breathe calmly through my spiracles.” Of course, one can’t see boundaries of air, hidden police cars are at least in part hidden, and humans don’t have spiracles to calmly breathe through. Without a clarifying transition, the speaker goes on to tell us what occurs (in contrast to what he “watched for”): “The newest models of cars, / the ancestral gasp of the woman sleeping next to me.”

“[A]ncestral gasp”—what a phrase! Somehow the woman’s breathing is linked to her dead relatives.  Our speaker “tried imagining” a scene to help make sense of this observation. But it’s difficult to make sense of “feathered stonewalls.”

Enter the second stanza. Here, we get what seem to be the first overt instructions from the manual on “How To Make Friends.” A friend might “give you pictures of yourself that they took / or show you how to highlight the text and drag it. / They may try to teach you the difference / between each of the 16 quarter winds.” While all of these examples may be things shared between friends, these moments in themselves will not make a friendship.

A friendship, like a feathered stonewall, is a lot more complicated, a lot more atmospheric than the clean yellow line of the highlighting tool in Microsoft Word. With this philosophy, we can approach Uncle Harold’s 20-foot ladder and its ambiguous midpoint. The winds that a friend might have tried to help you distinguish between come at you “all at once.”

The poem began with a search for “air mass boundaries,” then shifted to consider the merits of a sharp border provided by a highlighter. But, behind some bushes there are cop cars—public servants waiting to serve you up a speeding ticket. In the end, defined perimeters give way to “a stigmatized halo / around each white and amber light.”

- The Editors