It’s Not My Opinion
The money is gone,
but the apartment is washed clean and pearlescent
and you are cooking les pommes de terre for this earthy hour of evening
as the brow I have felt helplessly balloon brokenly renounces worry
and your voice of gold and jet leaps to invite the beggar New York moon into our home
taste a milky breeze purling through the pacific window
gazing on the ecstatic stars seen hundreds of years from their former selves
and in Washington Heights the granite cliff’s sparkling black corresponds
to the idea of mermaids and nightingales
I must confess that my imagination is a rogue but you are richer for it
it’s the kudzu of my hunger that worries me, even you undevourable as the sea!
Let me be not that kind of death, the monotone, the abundantly poor:
be then the coral reef, and I will be an infinite diversity of birdfish.
| Robert Cunningham |
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levelheaded: It’s Not My Opinion
We’re glad the word “ecstatic” appears in this poem. It gives us a solid entryway into this speaker’s purview. The poem presents itself as a single sentence. It describes a single scene in which the speaker watches an unnamed “you” cook potatoes in a presumably modest apartment (since “The money is gone”). But around this scene an “ecstatic” universe develops. The speaker creates “mermaids and nightingales” from the cliffs of Washington Heights. The language floats off the tongue with “pommes de terre” instead of potatoes. We are shown a “coral reef” and an “infinite diversity of birdfish” from a single scene between the speaker and the “you.”
The poem creates a scaffold of imaginative language, self-conscious but fraught with joy. The speaker knows he is hoisting “you” out of reality and into ideality. By saying, “I must confess that my imagination is a rogue but you are richer for it,” the speaker says “I know I’m embellishing, but I’m gonna do it anyway.” Poetry is reliant on embellishment, particularly when talking about the love and joy and connection we feel with someone else. It’s not enough to say “You are important and have a nice voice.” Instead we must say you are “undevourable as the sea!” with a “voice of gold and jet.” It’s in the moment the speaker “confesses” his “rogue” imagination that we come to trust his rich language and understand that the emotions they signal are overwhelming.
Perhaps no poem we’ve been lucky enough to publish has echoed so thoroughly of Whitman. Whitman took as fact the idea that any “you” was a creation of an “I”: “You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you”. We don’t doubt that “you” is a legit, bones-and-flesh human creature. But, the poem’s version of “you” exists only in the speaker’s—the poet’s—imagination. The speaker fears he’ll be “that kind of death, the monotone, the abundantly poor” and acknowledges that this particular “you” can only survive as long as sonorous, rich language is being written, or as long as it’s being read.
– The Editors
