levelheaded: Heaping Dusk

 

Early on, this poem develops a rhythm that works well to convey the routine the speaker uses to recreate the passage of time. In the first line, the phrase “Every week” sets up the poem’s periodic quality. But more conspicuously, the poem’s repetition of “delphinium” is an enactment of the speaker’s routine. By the end of the poem, we can just about anticipate the recurrence of the “delphinium.” The flowers become our repeated experience, just as they represent the repeated experience of the speaker.

 

Through this accrual of time, we understand the poem’s “Heaping Dusk” as a kind of accumulative foreboding. The delphinium can mean “another great day.” Or they can signal dusk as it “reappeared in the darkness.” The poem is framed as a “story.” The speaker says she “loosed her fleet alphabet at the table.” She speaks of “my best diction.” If the poem describes a memory, the speaker understands her memory as a “fiction.” The poem is conscious of itself as a narrative. But the poem’s cyclical sense of time – the inertia of the speaker’s routine – may be what holds the poem together most.

 

The speaker’s self-consciousness makes it easy to trust her when she tells us of “the bramble the prisms of ruin” hidden behind the façade of the delphinium. We aren’t meant to piece the poem into a cogent account of her relationship, but there is something conveyable embedded in the “bramble.” The speaker tells us, “he wanted another turn of the glass,” then “he was the glass.” She describes “the voice of the wine the red incentive.” If her days begin with “delphinium,” they end with alcohol and dreams of “violent bird wings of hunting and hiding of bird scraps.”

 

Through the poem, the speaker reckons with her past. She reexamines her emotional state: “while I thought each of those days was filled with repose I was fragile.” She questions her motivations: “To be honest I had never owned elegance and needed each trivial hand of it.” This is a thoughtful, melancholy poem. It’s a poem that admits to “spinning” moods and psychological fallibility, but it’s also an earnest attempt to understand the multiplicity of ideas and emotions that had her “clogged with endearment.”

 

 

-The Editors