levelheaded: Resolutions

“Resolutions” is weighty title. It’s one of those large, abstract, one-word titles with an array of meanings. It could refer to screen resolution – a contemporary use of the word but potentially a fresh metaphor for clarity and accuracy. It could refer to “resolve” as a synonym for “determination,” i.e. the speaker has a great resolve to make it to tomorrow. Point being, the title is big enough to lend this brief poem some of its enormity. Probably, “resolutions” refers to a promise (think New Year’s resolutions), and importantly, in any promise there is a sense of hope.

In only eleven lines, this poem uses the word “Tomorrow” five times. The speaker is looking to the future – tellingly, to the immediate future. The speaker’s resolutions are small and specific, but also turn broad and impactful. She starts out talking about a time “when lawnmowers grow silencers.” This would be a pleasant development for anyone trying to sleep through the neighbor’s lawn mowing, but it’s not a development of great import. It is a small, personal desire. But these resolutions grow larger. Her tomorrow of “plastic surgery for mild scoliosis” may be personal, but it also looks out at the world. And when we get to “the day hot but not from global warming,” it’s clear she’s thinking more generally about the world, hoping more broadly for changes.

Structurally, the poem’s resolutions are interesting and odd. The first three lines, the first resolution, is a “sentence” made of three adjunct clauses. The lines are halves of an incomplete thought. The second resolution is composed largely of two abstracted “of” phrases. “[T]he day hot but not from global warming” comes close to a complete thought, but it’s not a complete sentence, implying there’s something more. It implies more because a subsequent line gives more. Finally in the seventh line we’re given a complete thought delivered in a complete sentence: “Tomorrow I’ll write snitty little letters, / each one a complete oeuvre.” These lines stand out for thier completeness, but they also stand out because they turn the poem in on itself. Is this poem one of her “snitty little letters”?

The poem returns to incomplete clauses with the verbless lines “Tomorrow / tight jeans but with no seams on the sides.” But by that point it’s too late. Somewhere in there we cross a line wherein the speaker’s tangible hopes turn to a broad conceptual one. The final couplet is unlike any of the other resolutions for tomorrow because it is purely abstract. What is “action plus” and why would anyone want it to be “corrupt”? No answers here, but the lines again open the poem up to something larger than just this speaker or this reader. They have the same weighty abstraction as the title.

– The Editors