If you were sideways
in a crowded room, wagging rounded
glasses in small talk with other people.
If the math is off by some stain of
a fraction and I think you ghost,
stop almost following me.
If perhaps, you landed otherwise: cast
at different angles by slight measures
of the moon when it drops egg-smooth
past my window. I wondered if barely.
If your car, driving 65 miles per hour
east, while mine, driving 75 miles
per hour west, is divided by
just this, a cluttered line
of highway flowers.
If when I am trying on a cardigan
and the dressing room curtain slides
back to reveal that sudden cube
of shopping mall light: have you taken
your salmon-white receipt to muscle,
gently past, toward other things?
| Sarah Edwards |
|
levelheaded: If you were sideways
In the realm of mathematics, “If/then” statements are a mode of deductive reasoning whereby one can infer a particular truth based on what was previously determined to be true. This week’s poem by Sarah Edwards is essentially five “If” statements. By punctuating these fragments like they were complete sentences, Edwards subtly reveals the speaker’s psychological hang-up. Reflecting on the loss of someone dear to her, the speaker is left to imagine that person’s possibilities rather than knowing his or her reality.
Not until the last three lines are we made aware that loss is the emotional crux of the poem. This revelation is possible due to Edwards’ use of a single colon that stands in for the word “then” in the final stanza. The result is that the poem’s five “If” statements are reshaped into “If/then” statements, steering us to reevaluate what we previously read. The small talk, the ghost, the moon, the highway flowers and shopping mall light all gain new context. Our speaker has lost someone. She is wondering what the deceased or departed might do in her absence.
The speaker can’t know what the person no longer with her is doing. She can only speculate—a concept that is wonderfully illustrated by Edwards in a couple different ways. The more obvious of these is that the poem ends with a question mark. Whereas the first four stanzas present “If” statements declaratively, punctuated as sentences, the effort to draw a conclusion from them only yields doubt.
Edwards’ diction throughout the poem further demonstrates the speaker’s limitations in terms of knowing the physical and emotional whereabouts of the departed. In each of the poem’s “If” statements, mathematical terms surface—words like rounded, fraction, angles, measures, divided, line, and cube. The fourth stanza sounds like a word problem.
“If/then” statements aim to prove things based on what has already been proven. The trouble for our speaker is that with human beings, with people who inhabit a strange world that is an amalgam of shopping malls and moonlight, consumers check out and salmon swim upstream. One truth does not necessarily illuminate another, particularly when different elements of the equation abide by different rules. Some things, like loss, remain inexplicable.
– The Editors
