Man Revises Nature
All tents should be silk. I can’t oil canvas
shoes anymore, I’ve had it. When I come
back to the city, everything is the same.
The men all wear beards again and the
girls are cutting their hair or braiding it
and everyone is baking, especially the muscular ones.
Flowers are expensive for a reason.
All the lines radiate from the center.
We have a lot to learn as a species.
Our ancestors crossed very cold spaces.
If it were us, we would have surely died.
Everyone comes over and walks down
spiral steps. Sometimes someone ends up bleeding.
The piano hasn’t been tuned for three years
but the man who tunes it has small hands
so we will be okay. Some strings go AWOL
and others march in line. I was in a bell choir
when I was a child. That nun could play
but couldn’t sing. Me neither. Many nuns
have survived violent childhoods, which makes sense.
Boys like to stick with other boys and girls
like to stick together until that stops. Girls like
to be the only girl in the room, more or less
than boys like to be the only boy. These truths
are harmful to certain kids. I never wanted
to be a girl, but not for the reasons you think.
Boys were allowed to bike ride with their shirts off.
My husband is really good at doing flips.
Like seriously good at this. It makes me very
nervous. The tension of the diving board.
And the little ones say Wow. There is
an inflatable shark on the loose. And only
one raft, not big enough for us all. Soon,
the pool guys will come and find us bleached here.
The pool guys are always guys. I don’t know
if their work is skilled or unskilled labor.
I’ve never had a pool. I lied to colleagues
in an icebreaker and said I know
how to tune pianos. And when asked what tools
I used, I said an awl and a really good ear. People
who don’t know awls believed me and I won that game easily.
We were in a townhouse in Harlem
and the basement was filled with organs.
The soft electric buzz and pedals for your feet.
I learned not to overuse the damper pedal
on the piano like playing underwater. In
my childhood home an oil painting hung
above the piano: blue waves, a storm green sky
and a gilt gold frame. My Italian grandfather
left an abalone table with carved gold legs and
a statue of some princess. Two nights ago
everything collapsed in the middle of the night.
Glass and plaster everywhere. My parents heard
the crash, looked outside, found the wreck in the morning.
There were no survivors. My grandpa loved
ornate things, a man of taste. Men are always
reinventing taste. When I found my tastebuds
for the first time, I thought I was dying.
Maybe kids will start growing teeth from their
post-gender throats. We agree that something has to change.
| Emily Brandt |
|
levelheaded: Man Revises Nature
This poem’s frequent present tense makes the poem feel immediate and off-the-cuff, but much is rooted in memory. Take the man who “tunes” the piano. We’re told, “The piano hasn’t been tuned for three years,” and yet the man still “tunes” the piano. It’s a small moment, but it’s representative of the poem’s tendency to vacillate from the present to the past, from certainty to ambiguity.
Similarly, there is tension between the speaker’s authoritative voice and the incompleteness of what she’s actually saying. In the poem’s very first sentence – “All tents should be silk” – the speaker reveals a dictative voice in which she is willing to say what “should” be without explaining why or what initiated her line of thought. This mode of speech carries through the poem in lines like “Flowers are expensive for a reason” and “Men are always / reinventing taste.” These lines are all conclusion, no reasoning, and they ask us to pay extra attention to the speaker’s motives.
In some instances, the speaker’s authority wavers more obviously. In the fourth stanza, she uses the phrase “more or less” to take no stance on whether boys or girls care more about being unique to a room. Still, the sentence has a declarative, conclusive structure and tone. In moments like this, it’s clear the speaker recognizes the imperfection of her authority. Her self-consciousness saves the poem from absolutism. It also builds on the poem’s title, making man’s revision of nature seem as possibly flaky as the speaker’s own attempts to crystallize the world in her declarative sentences.
Speaking of the poem’s title, “Man Revises Nature” clearly has something to say about gender. The poem treats its preoccupation with maleness – see the men with beards, boys, husband, pool guys, and grandpa of later stanzas – as a backdrop for a complex, unsettled look at gender. Some of her thoughts are commonplace – the boys vs. girls approach in the fourth stanza, the “pool guys are always guys” (boys will be boys?) in the sixth – but some are layered and personal. The speaker’s boast when we’re told her husband is really good at flips (“Like seriously good”) comes right before she reveals her nervousness. She is at once proud and afraid in the face of her husband’s frivolity. We might say something similar about the broken table at the end. There is something dismissive in the speaker’s description of “a statue of some princess.” Yet the phrases “everything collapsed” and “the wreck in the morning” recognize and mourn some kind of loss.
This is a dense, tousled poem, and it collapses on the ambiguous “something” of the final line. The odd and specific idea of “post-gender throats” suggests something about our idea of gender is the “something” that “has to” change. More broadly the poem seems to remind us something will change because, as the present becomes past, things always change.
– The Editors
