levelheaded: Upon a Line by Michael Cunningham

The best directive for how to read Doug Paul Case’s “Upon a Line by Michael Cunningham” is the line by which it is inspired. Let’s begin with the introductory clause, “A bee thumps heavily.” There are a lot of things bees are known for—their stripes, their honey, their sting. One thing they aren’t known for is their obesity. Yet here, the insect that appears practically weightless as it hovers over flowers in the wild, is thumping “heavily.” Significantly, this poem, which at first glance appears to be a goofy little imaginative rant about a busy bee in one’s kitchen, invites a much heavier figurative reading.

After imagining that the bee “crashes” into his kitchen, the speaker wonders what it might do there: “Will it construct a colander nest? Try to pollinate / the freshly-cut roses […]?” Given that this poem is written by a human and that its readers are all human, it’s hard not to think of its content in relation to human life. The bee’s first hypothetical future compares easily with any person who aims to literally or figuratively build a home. Renowned as one might be at building, the home is going to have holes in it. What next? Try to pollinate. That is (fourth grade science refresher!), try to bring the male and female parts together, allowing for reproduction. After working and working to make homes and babies, only one thing awaits us—death. Ugh. Maybe we’ll drown, maybe we’ll get trapped in the fridge, maybe will die “under [the] knife,” but one thing is certain—we’ll die. Thus, the first line instructs us again. Our heavy thumping is also done “insistently.”

Part of the strength of Case’s work is his attention to language. In no place is this more obvious than the strangeness of the final phrase, “slicing eggs.” Here, “slicing” can serve as both a verb and an adjective modifying “eggs.” In a poem that encompasses the concepts of birth and death, these words deserve even greater attention. In other places too, Case’s word pairings present dichotomies of pleasantry and pain. The roses are “freshly-cut” in line five. Similarly, this time at the close of the poem’s first line, inside the frame that allows the speaker to look both outward and inward, there’s a “windowpane.”

– The Editors