levelheaded: To Leave One Bed Out

This poem’s first three “sentences” present things the speaker does not have. She has not “gone out.” She does not have “one dog.” She does not have the ability “to close the car door.” Each of these has its unique breadth of meaning. For instance, an inability “to close the car door” could be seen as a stand in for a physical or emotional inability to perform the menial, daily tasks that allow a person to move on from a particular place, metaphorical or not. The poem is open in this way. It uses language that refers to specific items and actions to build a detailed but amorphous feeling. This carries on through the first section. “To leave one bed out for the tornado” is another good example. It uses the language of the missing dog—leaving food or water out at night—to create an aura of threat and sacrifice.

Especially in its first section, the poem relies on infinitive verb phrases like “To have never” and “To be missing” to establish an ambiguously reflective point of view. The “to” verb phrases keep the poem suspended between past and future without actually happening in an obvious the present. These early moments take place in a weird space where the speaker can be almost nostalgic for a past that hasn’t happened yet.

The poem switches gears in the second section, which gives us a handful of verbless nouns around the poem’s first complete sentence. The first two images—“night river” and “Drapery and feathers”—are mostly atmospheric. But the phrase, “We had to leave,” gives us a definite “we” and a sort of central action. This “leaving” gives us an important framework in which to read the rest of the poem. “[F]old feet and carry” and “close the car door” take on increased importance within the context of an forced departure. The fear and danger is made even clearer with the last phrase of the section: “An extermination.”

The third section is the most mysterious in both language and structure. First, the language. It turns technical, almost clinical, in its description of slow (or non-) movement. “[S]tasis” and “latency” have medical meanings that may parallel the earlier weakness which disallows closing the car door. “[G]radual integration” and “massive force” edge toward the kind of cliché one might read in an office email (think “synergy” or “leveraging”). But the oddest moment comes in the first word: “Isa.” It’s a short, uncommon word with various potential meanings (especially in the limited context of this poem) from the Arabic name for Jesus to the Iranian Space Agency. But importantly, it is one of the poem’s most private and mysterious moments. Second, the structure. The open parentheses are the most conspicuous use of punctuation in the poem. They lend the section (and the poem) a sense of incompleteness, as if some clarifying piece of information is missing.

The poem’s final section is also its clearest—or at least most grammatically complete. The poem largely returns to the infinite verbs of the first section, but everything is written in complete sentences, and everything pushes toward a cohesive (if not perfectly plotted) narrative. There are some domestic concerns in the “dishes” and “house.” There is something even more recognizable (and more tangibly domestic) in the bill to fix the gas leak. But most revealing is that the “we” from the second section has turned into the singular “He” of the last. Just as the speaker reveals to us what may be the central concern of the poem, the language also crystallizes and makes communication its first concern. It’s a well-wrought conflation of content and form that we can backtrack beautifully through the rest of the poem.

-The Editors