levelheaded: Her Art

“Her Art” is her elusiveness. Chambers’ poem opens with the speaker recalling losing at a classic shell game. The “wooden nickel” that the woman was hiding suggests that the game was rigged from the beginning, and the false coin’s hiding place—“under / her tongue”—adds a sense of eroticism to the scene. Sharing a line with “her tongue” is the phrase “She slapped.” With this seemingly nonchalant pairing, Chambers fuses eroticism and violence, pleasure and pain—enacting love’s contradictions.

When the speaker’s attention was slapped away, “it / melted into the sand.” With this shift, the poem itself changes scenes. Cinematically speaking, the camera takes a wide-frame shot of a “ship / on the horizon” before cutting back to the speaker gathering his things and tasting his lips. On them is the taste of the woman from the first scene, “like winter / through a window.” The distant ship presents the poem’s recurrent theme of elusiveness. As does her taste. She is there, but visible only from a distance. She is outside of him.

The speaker wants to “claim” the woman of this poem, but she proves unattainable, immeasurable. More abstract than fluid ounces, she is vast, natural, and complex—“snow / and ocean.” With the singsong alliteration and assonance of “pocket / the play of her plié,” the speaker’s desire to capture the woman’s playfulness is embodied by the poet’s craft. In the end, however, these efforts to harness her prove futile. Contrasting the playful nature created by the long-vowel sounds in the line above are the short vowel sounds and closing consonant sounds of the final line, in which a mysterious woman slips like a ship “into the scrim.”

– The Editors