How To Make Friends
While light held I watched for air mass boundaries,
sunspots, cops behind median bushes,
tried to breathe calmly through my spiracles.
The newest models of cars,
the ancestral gasp of the woman sleeping next to me.
I tried imagining the pillow and cradle topography
surrounding the small New England churchyard
where her ancestors are buried,
the pin and feathered stonewalls.
People may give you pictures of yourself that they took
or show you how to highlight the text and drag it.
They may try to teach you the difference
between each of the 16 quarter winds.
Like Uncle Harold, how proud he was
when he bought his first 20-foot extension ladder.
Somewhere in the middle crease
you find yourself walking into all 32 winds at once.
As evening comes, a stigmatized halo
around each white and amber light.
| Daniel Hales |
|
levelheaded: How To Make Friends
You could read Daniel Hales’ “How To Make Friends” several times without quite grasping the connection between the first and second stanza. The stanzas aren’t paired up with an in-your-face logic. The dominant pronoun shifts from “I” to “you.” Most notably, there’s no clear-cut connection between the events thathappened in the first stanza and what may happen in the second.
In the first stanza, the speaker’s actions seem to have occurred in the context of failure: “While light held I watched for air mass boundaries, / sunspots, cops behind median bushes, / tried to breathe calmly through my spiracles.” Of course, one can’t see boundaries of air, hidden police cars are at least in part hidden, and humans don’t have spiracles to calmly breathe through. Without a clarifying transition, the speaker goes on to tell us what occurs (in contrast to what he “watched for”): “The newest models of cars, / the ancestral gasp of the woman sleeping next to me.”
“[A]ncestral gasp”—what a phrase! Somehow the woman’s breathing is linked to her dead relatives. Our speaker “tried imagining” a scene to help make sense of this observation. But it’s difficult to make sense of “feathered stonewalls.”
Enter the second stanza. Here, we get what seem to be the first overt instructions from the manual on “How To Make Friends.” A friend might “give you pictures of yourself that they took / or show you how to highlight the text and drag it. / They may try to teach you the difference / between each of the 16 quarter winds.” While all of these examples may be things shared between friends, these moments in themselves will not make a friendship.
A friendship, like a feathered stonewall, is a lot more complicated, a lot more atmospheric than the clean yellow line of the highlighting tool in Microsoft Word. With this philosophy, we can approach Uncle Harold’s 20-foot ladder and its ambiguous midpoint. The winds that a friend might have tried to help you distinguish between come at you “all at once.”
The poem began with a search for “air mass boundaries,” then shifted to consider the merits of a sharp border provided by a highlighter. But, behind some bushes there are cop cars—public servants waiting to serve you up a speeding ticket. In the end, defined perimeters give way to “a stigmatized halo / around each white and amber light.”
– The Editors
