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from Have the Hands Ask it Back


I’m aware of the new reply, differences between early and later starts to the day.  A greater sense of rousing—ducks tucked into little patterns, distant flock of urban matters.  I am here and alone, sharing.  The hawk doesn’t come around.  The hummingbird pipped as if a punctured balloon, zipping away.  Property as it belongs.  We look in on more private things than we know.  With a Palomino I am let into any field.  Each willow lisps the morning over and after noon we calibrate a point of view, to rows a farm knows.  I was gentle with hate.  I am sorry for belittling the things around me in youth.  Sun collects in canoes.  The canoe as object, the sun helps to make our move in the object the image all along.  That what we trust ourselves in while moving, the Palomino, the boat, the bog, becomes the completion of the image and after being looked at.  Still things remain.  Often the path is ordinary but disordered.  My looking turned into a hand demanding.




Tyler Flynn Dorholt

levelheaded: from Have the Hands Ask it Back


Ever been on a road trip with a bad driver? With somebody that has no sense of direction? How about with someone that’s got a really annoying voice? Or with somebody who rambles on and on without making any sense? It sucks. Unfortunately, and for many of the same reasons, so do a lot of poems. Lucky for us, this installment from Tyler Flynn Dorholt’s “Have the Hands Ask it Back” does not suck.


As every road warrior knows, the relationship between driver and passenger makes or breaks the trip; it frames the window through which we watch the scenery whiz by. From the poem’s start, we don’t know where we’re headed, but we do know the guy behind the wheel is someone we can trust. The first sentence proves he can handle a complicated grammatical structure. The second says grammar will not constrain him. Throughout the poem, Dorholt makes sharp turns (“ducks tucked into little patterns, distant flock of urban matters. I am here and alone, sharing”) on a road that bends on linguistic, intellectual, and emotional associations.


These turns are what keep us simultaneously on the edge of our seats and securely buckled. He moves from “flock” to “alone” to “hawk” to “hummingbird” to the sound of “a punctured balloon, zipping away” to a sharp, wise assertion that impermanence is characteristic of anything of which we claim ownership. For Dorholt, words are gateways to discovery: “With a Palomino I am let into any field.” The result is a poem capable of moving freely from a tender, vague confession about the past (“I am sorry for belittling the things of my youth”) to a sharp awareness of the present (“sun collects in canoes”).


Among other things, this piece gushes with the benefits of liberating oneself to the process of development. At the same time, though its author says “the Palomino, the boat, the bog” carry us forward, he recognizes they remain after we’ve gone. Like most of us, as the final sentence indicates, this speaker expects something from the people or things he devotes his attention to. It is worth noting, however, that the speaker’s realization of this fact is where this section hits its only roadblock. The first twelve lines teach us that if we’ve gotten from Ohio to Illinois, thank Indiana. The thirteenth causes us to question our motives. It coaxes us like an Indiana tourism advertisement—Come back, stay awhile, there’s a lot to see here.



– The Editors