from A Home Big Enough for Remembering
You even heard him
Amidst the fires in London
Making arrangements with his body double
Closing in on his 60th birthday
He became more the man
He always wanted to be
Not like that time in Bangkok
When the maker said, there’s hope for you yet
Under the bridge where pinup girls fiddled with palindromes
Voluptuous like November
Marching barefoot
Not like that time with the truck driver
Star gazing accidents on I-95
Stopping for a bite at Penn Station after the rain
Silenced like a ghost or girl dreaming of winter
Running at daybreak.
Kiely Sweatt |
levelheaded: from A Home Big Enough for Remembering
Generally, when it comes to expressing a full thought in English, something is and something does. Subject and predicate are our two fundamental concepts, leaving most other grammatical building blocks to clarify or modify those two most basic notions.
With this in mind, take the clause “pinup girls fiddled with palindromes.” It expresses a complete thought and could stand on its own as a sentence, but here, it modifies the word “bridge.” Then “bridge” is used as a part of the prepositional phrase “Under the bridge” which modifies either the “time in Bangkok” or “When the maker” or both. It’s interesting to note how many of the poem’s lines are descriptors. There are very few hard and fast subjects or predicates, even among complete clauses, that could not also be taken as descriptors of other lines. In some cases these adjective or adverb phrases run parallel to one another. Other times they fit inside one another like nesting dolls, becoming incrementally more focused.
For example, there are different ways we can read the first lines:
“You even heard him amidst the fires in London, making arrangements with his body double, closing in on his 60th birthday. He became more the man he always wanted to be.”
“You even heard him amidst the fires in London, making arrangements with his body double. Closing in on his 60th birthday, he became more the man he always wanted to be.”
“You even heard him. Amidst the fires in London, making arrangements with his body double, closing in on his 60th birthday, he became more the man he always wanted to be.”
The differences between these readings are subtle, but they highlight the way this poem uses its one run-on sentence to disorient us. The poem is written in the past tense, so its slipperiness evokes the fallibility of memory. Our memories often blend together, and by the time we get to “that time with the truck driver” we are prepared for the poem’s leaps to “Stopping for a bite at Penn Station” and “dreaming of winter” where an already grammatically fluid poem becomes even more elusive. Each of the readings above exists simultaneously, giving the poem a wispy, memorial feel, as if some thought, some memory, keeps slipping from our grasp.
– The Editors