levelheaded: Moonrising

One after another, the images that make up Samuel Piccone’s “Moonrising” contradict themselves. The easiest way to illustrate these contradictions is to categorize lines of the poem as either soft or hard. Take for instance the first three lines: “A milk drip / glows behind / Devil’s Backbone.” The first two lines, images of liquid and light, are akin to softness. The word “Backbone,” on the other hand, is better described as hard.

If we continue through the whole poem in this manner, we see that this subtle structural element occurs throughout. Rocks (hard) are hushed (soft) by tourniquet (hard) feathers (soft). The soft “Indian paintbrush shapes” are offset by the hard “grease track tow-trucks.”

What’s wonderful about Piccone’s craft is that he doesn’t beat the poem to death by editorializing it, by winking incessantly at his reader to point out that there’s more to the poem than appears at first glance. On the contrary, his images are allowed to speak for themselves. First and foremost, these images simply present a striking physical landscape—and that may be all that they intend to do.

For readers wanting more, these contrasting images are not exclusively defined as being soft or hard to touch. They also bear light or dark metaphorical meanings. To explore this angle, it’s best to turn back to the words used when these images are presented. Where there is life-sustaining “milk” there is a “Devil.” Where there is a “cross-hatched” pattern, it resembles “mortar-fire.” All of this occurs under the umbrella of a hard, heavy moon in the soft, weightless act of rising.

– The Editors