levelheaded: Traveler’s Lament or Slow Apocalypse

The “or” hinge of “Traveler’s Lament or Slow Apocalypse” creaks open to offer two separate titles OR (or!) both titles at once. Or is intricate in its gymnastic ability to mean completely alternate options or alternate terms for the same thing. It’s either a choice or an equation. We can read this poem as spoken by a mourning wanderer or as spoken by someone forefronting a “Slow Apocalypse” or as spoken by someone who thinks those two are the same.

The poem fears—citing “distance,” insufficient supplies—the end of the speaker’s world. “[A]nd” appears five times in the poem (echoing, of course, end). Ends are buried in “trend,” “expends,” “friends.” Rhyme and repetition make for a predictable structure. We can rely on, more or less, familiar patterns to develop as we read, contrary to the patternless catastrophe of the topic.

While this traveler does indeed lament, a type of expression traditionally found at the beginning of an elegy, neither praise for the idealized vanished nor solace (typical elements concluding an elegy) ties up the utterance. Elegy is visited and then abandoned in favor of sticking with sorrow. What started as a poem in a form we might recognize stays put, does NOT move around or splinter off—it DOESN’T travel.

Likewise in its subversion, “Slow Apocalypse” smacks oxymoronic. Don’t we think of the revelation of the end of the world, of the end of time, as happening in a sudden, or at least fast, burst? “Slow” stretches out painfully, acknowledges the surreal slowing of time during bad moments, renders the end oddly able to be witnessed and recorded.

Older uses a succession of the word “last” at the end of the first stanza. Like “or,” there are different ways to interpret “last,” and, weirdly, the meanings kind of push up against one another. We can intuit that Older means final, but one of the best things about language is that you can’t get rid of the other stuff packed in there. The “[l]ast ships, last letters, [. . . ] last e-mail” are ALSO the most recent ones (as in: These last few nights I’ve eaten the same thing for dinner); the only ones remaining (as in: We’re the last ones left); and they continue, they are enough (as in: There’s enough gas in the car to last us ’til we’re there).

We’ve run out of time (the end is nigh!), but there are other things not to be missed here. There’s the fact that the poem is a lament explicitly from a traveler (Why this specification?); that there are three “un-” words (“unstoppable,” “unwinding,” “unseen”), asserting particular negative force/reversal/removal; and so on.

But for now: the end.

– The Editors