levelheaded: No Latin Term

This poem begins with an unidentified “they” combing a map for “all that was lost.” They do this “thinking their hands capable,” but because they only think their hands are capable, we doubt their ability to actually find what they’re looking for. Our doubt is confirmed in the second section’s report that “Cryptic clues led / only to frayed oceans.” We can hear the wash and foam of the ocean in the “fr” and “sh” sounds of “frayed oceans.” We can see the oceans on the map as “blue bodies ringed / with poisonous shrubs.” The poison leaks into the third section when the speaker tells us “All day they picked sumac” (which, in addition to being an apparently useful plant, can be poisonous). The enjambment of the third section’s first lines introduces the “sumac / songs” that we’re later told “hummed / like flies against meat.” In their inability to find what’s lost, “they” call out into the world with a sinister music wrought in the same poison they find during their search for what’s lost.

Still, despite its ominous narrative thread, the poem is airy and ahistorical, allowing “they” to be virtually anyone and “all that was lost” to be almost anything. We get some guidance from the poem’s title, which does several things at once. First, it reminds us of language’s possible failures. In some sense, there is “no Latin term” because the poem’s emotional and intellectual immensity escapes the simplicity of a simple “term.” Second, the idea the there is specifically no “Latin” term grants the poem its mythic touch. It’s as if were being spoken to through fragments of an ancient parable. Third and perhaps most important, the title cloaks the poem’s short sections in mystery. Even if we recognize the age-old idea that language can be insufficient, we can’t tell why it’s not enough. In other words, what is there “no Latin term” for?

In part, the poem is about the reactions we have, the songs we sing, or the poems we write in the face of something unnamable, in this case “all that was lost.” Each of our reactions becomes a part of what we try to name, and vice versa. Poison works its way into the poem’s “sumac / songs” because poison is what the guitarists know about their unspeakable loss. Something, though, compels them to create. Something compels them from scouring maps to picking guitars. Make what you will of “the notes hummed / like flies against meat” – there are sure notes of death and decay – but at least something is making a sound against the silence of their toxic world.

-The Editors