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In life there’s an opportunity to count

 

In life there’s an opportunity to count mornings, even if one isn’t trying.  There’s one and one and one.  Now the sun glares off new leaves; now heavy snow falls skyward off a pond—but only where it reflects black.  In ripples the mystery is negligible.  Normal.  There is no arguing, it is today and I have sinned what I have sinned.  And it is not a stretch to imagine absolution approaching in each new day—to have my face eclipsed by a cool hand and a cloth soaked in ether, just to fall asleep for a night and then wake up to one.




Travis Cebula

levelheaded: In life there’s an opportunity to count


Not easy to start a poem as Travis Cebula does, with the phrase “[i]n life,” let alone continuing, “[i]n life there’s an opportunity.” Both phrases present commonly used abstractions. But the strangeness of what follows—“to count mornings, even if one isn’t trying”—balances the sentence. The concrete notion of counting is intriguingly awkward after the grand opening. Try or not, Cebula says, counting is what we can do.


Counting is exact, mathematical. In its linearity and order, counting unifies the leafy and the snowy mornings. Cebula could merely be saying: this morning, that morning, whatever variation—they’re countable as equals, “one and one and one.” Yet he continues, “only where it reflects black.” Meaning, only in this somewhat abnormal case, it is countable. Or only then it counts. Also, “[i]n ripples the mystery is negligible. Normal.” Hence the poet’s implied conclusion: normal is negligible, anomaly counts.


Let’s leave anomalies aside for a moment and examine the personal aspect of the poem. “There is no arguing, it is today and I have sinned what I have sinned,” writes Cebula at the physical center of this small, dense poem. This sentence is perhaps the poem’s most straightforward statement. Yet soon after, the speaker wishes for something strange: “to have my face eclipsed by a cool hand and a cloth soaked in ether.”


Is he asking to be put to sleep (ether the anesthetic)? Perhaps forever? Is he also alluding to the regions of space now known not to exist? Either way, he wants “to fall asleep for a night and then wake up to one.” What is “one” though? One morning? Or maybe one that is able to grant “absolution,” the one? Cebula once again dances between the mundane and philosophical. While the acts of going to sleep and waking up to yet another one morning are markedly ordinary, at the same time, his words suggest the ultimate, everlasting sleep, which is death, and waking up to it in the form of absolution, a rebirth with the­ one.


If we add up all these components of the poem, the question is: are sins the blessed anomaly in a largely sinless, morning-ridden life? After all, without them there is no absolution, no cool hand eclipsing one’s face, no guilt to provoke a need for a break, no daydream in which one is half asleep half awake—a fitting phrase given the speaker’s state of mind.



– The Editors