levelheaded: There is a lot of work that actually goes on to prepare for nothingness

 

A midwestern highway. A car is on the move. We’re inside. The speaker feels it’s like a movie. A friend and a bird come to mind. A mutual friend of the friend comes to mind. He’s married now, and youth is long gone, as is the time when the speaker had “dreamed of going wherever / he’d take you,” but the midwest “with its thick skin” is still here, indecipherable, and the trip goes by without the speaker figuring it out, wishing again for something to repeat, another chance to be given, and who knows if it will be.

 

It is inevitable that we think of death when a poem presents itself with a road toward “nothingness.” It is similarly natural that we contemplate life when being taken on an enigmatic highway full of strange pairings of “vowels” and “bones,” “regret,” dreams, memories, “passages,” and “time” showing up twice in the final line meaning much more than what we measure with a clock.

 

So the scope here is pretty wide. But the poem feels intimate. Several things warm us up in this cold north-western small town. We’re in the speaker’s “[h]ome.” We’re in a small space, somewhat sheltered by the car and the “guardrail.” We’re also lured into the atmosphere by subtle things that happen with the poem’s syntax, especially its conjunctions.

 

The poem uses plus signs in place of “and.” Not uncommon, yet it does so in four different versions. “[B]ones + out” features the commonly used space before and after, dividing the sentence between trio descriptions of home (“vowels”/”regret”/”unbroken bones”) and trio descriptions of the landscape outside the car (“ankles”/”wheels”/”a movie”). The plus sign shows us what’s internal (home as a personal perception) and what’s external (the landscape, if conceptual or visual), here poetically merged, depicting a state of mind.

 

Next come “dazed+ dozing” that may have been “dazed + dozing” but the plus sign is stuck with “dazed.” Is it a typo or are we extra-dazed here in this car which will soon become a “red Camaro of […] youth”? “[D]azed+” describes the “lone robin chick” but also feels like an effect of this contemplation, perhaps partially a hallucination.

 

Third is “+translucent” preceded by “gray”—a description of the chick’s flesh. So it’s “dazed+” vs. “+translucent.” This reminds a certain LEVELER editor of a programming language’s difference between a = ++b and a = b++. In the first statement a and b end up equal. In the second, b will be larger by 1. It’s unrelated, of course, but a plus sign, we’re thinking, does something. It’s distracting and attractive. It is a sign, a symbol, where we would normally expect a word.

 

There’s one more: the “skin+passages” of the midwest. This time the words are fully attached. No spaces. Much has been said about the double-meaning in depicting land as a body. The land becomes a being, traveled as a body would be, full of sexual connotations. In this case it’s just “skin” but we’re still awakened: “green lushness” replaces the earlier “gray.” We’re ready for the finale. A “you’ll” two lines further feels strongly as an actual you (us readers) as opposed to most of the poem’s “you”’s, which seem to stand for “I” and account for one more reason why the poem feels intimate and inviting. This particular “you’ll” actually feels like both. The speaker, us, anyone: we’re given a card trick. We can’t figure it out. We think we will. Just need one more try. It’ll end with nothingness.

 

 

–The Editors