levelheaded: Husk

Every poem you read exists because its author stopped writing, at least for some interval, and stood up from his desk. In fact, every text marks a specific moment in time. It could follow that all poems are occupied with time, that they are little time capsules.

“Husk” opens with someone “[e]tching phases of the moon into a chicken bone.” This is not completely unlike writing a poem, compressing and rejuvenating the trope of the moon (time!). Cicadas contradict or slow the etching, an interruption (time!) we understand by the single “but” of line two. The insects “stop [him] from hearing you complain about childhood” (time!). Later, “floral deities” grant the speaker “immortality but leave [him] without eternal youth”—again, time. And of course divination (time!) motivates tarot card readings.

One thing we love about poems is how deeply we can enter them. “Husk” overtly references time, opening us up to searching for other ways it angles into the lines. Notably, the poem is written in present tense. That tense (and in this particular poem, the Frank O’Hara-like “I do this, I do that” sensibility) makes for a noticeable backdrop against which lines like these pop: “But the cicadas stop me from hearing you complain about childhood / Or your mother / who between long sections of bamboo is undressing.” The even-keeled present tense also creates grittiness in moments like “Which I eat, when it’s tender” and “you try to teach me,” since these indicate duration. The present tense collapses the poem, accordion-like, making strange and stretched the moments that aren’t “I do this, I do that.” “I find a flint knife and chuck it” starts and ends, whereas we get the sense that the mother could be undressing into perpetuity.

This speaker isn’t restrained. His actions, and his descriptions of them, flow. He finds a knife and “chuck[s] it”; his path to the bar fight is deliberate. Again against this kind of freewheeling backdrop, when things tighten up, it really shows. He chucks the knife at “the heart of the event,” and, in the last lines, he chucks a tarot card “between the ribs of the Event.” Aside from the discrepancy in capitalization between the two (Are they different brands of event? Is one a person or place, the other not?), we have nothing to work from to make sense of what this charged word means. Is it something that has happened, or will? Some result? Maybe it’s a life event—the loss or gain of a person or job, some big change in status—or even a sporting event. Or, the husk is the event, or the poem.

We can’t leave without a word on those cicadas. There’s a lot of hearing in this poem, evidence that the speaker is a close listener (and/or that he lives in the thick of noise). The insects prevent the speaker from hearing twice, but later the “stop me from hearing” phrase drops off, and instead they “stop [him] from sleeping alone.” Their merely being now has preventative power. The speaker’s history of aural perception over time, realizes the insects—sensing them is beside the point.

– The Editors