levelheaded: Here to There

The pronoun “it” in the first line of Elizabeth Clark Wessel’s poem could refer to the titular phrase “Here to There.”  Or, the pronoun could refer to the word “it” itself. Actually, anything at all that is sayable could be this two letter word’s missing antecedent.

The concept of blurred meanings introduced by this first line is central to the poem as a whole. Line two presents a speaker pushing on in the wake of lost significance. In the next couplet, meaning returns with new force, empowered by the poem’s first visual image. Wessel implants the idea that meaning, that the “it” we’ve been focused on is “The train [that] goes in and out of darkness” not through metaphor or simile, but through her consistent use of enjambment and spare punctuation.  Unimpeded by syntactical pauses, words, lines, and ultimately ideas flow from one to the next.

Take, for instance, line six: “The train crawls the train flies[.]” Lacking the expected caesura, the train is nearly at once slow and fast. This characteristic also translates to the way this line reads—quickly because the lack of punctuation allows us to zoom from one phrase to the next; slowly because we are not expecting these phrases to be paired without punctuation between them and as a result they command our focused attention.

Compare the above quoted line to the next one: “The doors flap open like gills[.]” Again, the syntactical elements of Wessel’s line enhance its content. This cleaner, sentence-like construction reads one way—quickly. So, our initial way of reading this line is to think of these train doors busting open in a rush. However, when we really study this line, when we envision the vehicle of the metaphor, what we originally perceived as clear becomes muddied. Fish gills, after all, open with a kind of steady slowness. Trains are heavy machines on a set course. Fish are organic beings that appear light and agile, capable of darting off in any direction.

The conundrum of finding meaning in the words and the world that are constantly redefining themselves continues in the next stanza: “The train marks the boundary of the earth / Then remakes it[.]” A line later, the speaker corrects herself mid-thought—further testament to the distrust she has in language.

Before coming to its close, Wessel’s poem makes a compelling turn. “You” enters the scene. Like the earlier pronoun “it,” “you” welcomes many possible interpretations. In all cases, the speaker needs something of this “you”—to “Please be of sound mind for me[.]” Significantly, the speaker then indulges in sonic pleasure—“Be impersonal or interpersonal / Be a personage or a personality”—as if orienting one’s mind toward sound could provide an escape from the complexities of meaning.

In the end though, the mind seeking sense returns. The process of getting from “Here to There” taught us an enormous amount about the speaker’s thought processes. These innermost thoughts revealed, by the final line the speaker is explicitly vulnerable.

– The Editors