levelheaded: Rapture

Beau Boudreaux’s poem is an expression of its one word title. From the start, the poet instructs us how to read him. The line “This loosening fall air” lets us know we’re dealing with a specific experience (“This”); it points towards the poem’s construction (a “loosening fall”); it moves freely, lightly while steeped in the natural world (“air”).

These few words do even more. “[F]all” presents a season, suggests actions at once harmful (“fall” down) and delightful (“fall” in love). The “fall” winks at Genesis (see bible, not band). The word “loosening” makes our tongues tumble, while the remaining monosyllabic words keep the line from turning silly. Throughout, in fact, the poem takes pleasure in sounds without ever being exclusively about sound.

Boudreaux’s is a giddy poem through the first fourteen lines—one that likens a momentarily exposed waistline to a “sliver / of a sunshot horizon.” Here, our author is exact in his description, yet far reaching, presenting a believable consciousness looking out at the world. Phrases like “key lime pie[,]” “sweet tea[,]” and “jasmine scent” regionalize the piece enough to convince us that we’re in a real place.

In the end, however, even though Boudreaux prefaces two of his final three nouns with indefinite articles, “the corner” and “the fence” could be any that lay tightly tucked away in our individual memories. Markedly, the poem’s free-wheeling, playful voice is silenced by an implicitly adult punctuation mark. Is this final period an acknowledgment of the limits of pleasure, love, memory, or childhood? Maybe. Either way, we bet Boudreaux would prefer that you—wonderfully familiar, inimitable you!—decide for yourself.

– The Editors