THE BREAKS

To learn more about your new Kenmore
washer, break the plastic seal.
—from the manufacturer’s instructions

I’ve a friend who says, “Treat anything mechanical
as if it’s just about to break.”
I’ve a feeling           broken-hearted
he’s talking about himself
in relation to his ex-wife,
but I don’t tell him that. She called me break the news
just before she left him. “Breaking up” was her phrase,
as if we were all broken promise still in grade school.
“I’m leaving,” she said, “For good.” I pictured him exactly
where I knew he was at the time—in mid-schuss
breakneck on a mogul-filled downhill in Vail.
He wouldn’t be back for two days, and had no idea
it would be to a broken home. And then,
no note, on the kitchen table or anywhere.
No red box on the wall: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
BREAK GLASS.

Two weeks later we sat line break
in front of a ridiculous amount of beer.
I was trying, at that point, to explain to him
that humans didn’t invent weaving… breaking point
that it was an innovation of certain brightly colored,
long-beaked birds, and when we stumbled upon
the wonderful, twisted nests, we figured them out
by breaking them apart.
Something in him broke loose, I guess. I’d been talking
as if I could say anything groundbreaking
about love. In retrospect, he probably should’ve broke my nose,
but all he did was sit there, for the first time, slumped over
in a bar, and cry. “I looked everywhere,” he said,
“for a note.” Everywhere. He kept saying it. What’s the word?
What’s the word for one of those great big crashing waves?

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011

A BATTLESHIP EXAMINES ITS FAITH

I dream
towels, dust streams,
a downpour of talcum.
I dream arid fields of sorghum.
But down where I’m fattest: frogmen swimming
on wave-wings, stoking my belly with the kindling
of justice. Captain, I’m a billion-shot salute, but guns
aren’t made to pull their own triggers. The Baltic makes me run
until my sides buckle but won’t let me collapse.
I call this salt-soup Heaven, but perhaps
I’m misdirected. The angels
of my dreams never change:
unarmed and dry,
they fly.

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011

David Robert Books
P. O. Box 541106
Cincinnati, OH 45254
ISBN 978-1934999837
2010, 96 pp., $18.00
www.davidrobertbooks.com

Carol Frith’s two for a journey revolves around two central characters, the “two” of the title: the “I” of the poems, and the “you” who is addressed throughout. The poems are a delicate rendering of the tensions and silences that are palpable in the air between the two. They probe with unflinching honesty and plangency the emotional terrain between two that are inseparably linked in this journey together. These are not the quarrels of young lovers, but the involutions of a deep and intense intimacy—the heart of mystery, a “sense / of something silent” that transcends them both.

Most of the poems involve the two characters in dialogue with each other, but when they speak—or even when they argue—their speech is beautifully oblique and allusive. Often they speak using the language of form, color, light, and texture. At other times, they speak through the landscape that surrounds them—through the grass, the sunlight, the flowers, the air, the rain, and the domestic spaces of the porch, the patio, the lawn. The landscape inhabits them as much as they inhabit the landscape. The “neurasthenic glare” of the light, the air that is “our own recycled breath,” the “blank sea of flowers” and the “sun-scorched grass” are imbued with their moods and become the language of their communion.

One poem defines love as “a question of movement and / color,” which also comments aptly on the collection itself. This is a story told in color, the dominant color being yellow—the yellow of the roses on the cover to the yellow that suffuses the collection, from yellow grass and air and light to yellow songs and sighs and heat. The color yellow is associated with the narrator, while the “you” is associated with blue: his “blue hands,” the “dark blue silence” between them, the tension between them “bluer / than the sea.” Occasionally, there are dramatic intrusions of other colors, such as the pink that characterizes the seductress of “Salt”:

The woman shifts. Her breasts crackle like flames
and turn pink as flamingos.

…and the orange that is the bitter citrus of reconciliation in “Corona: After-image” #6:

I taste you; citrus burns my palate, a case
of pungency. Your juice is bittersweet.
. . . I say orange, orange, a surfeit
of citric acid in the fragrant heat—
the scent of you entirely adequate.

I also enjoyed how the two characters experience the world synaesthetically; the senses merge or run together as do their lives: vowels are “thin arcs of light,” phonemes are “weightless in my palm,” a song is “like blue smoke,” and sunlight “crumbles in my palm.”

As the use of color and synaesthesia suggests, Frith’s poems have a painterly quality in their attention to not only color, but also light, shade, form, pattern, and texture. In addition to painting, the poet’s vision is also informed by photography: many of the poems concern surfaces, mirrors, exposures, reflections, and after-images. In “Wash of Water”:

You tell me I am counter-pressure, the second image
to your second image: I doubled into we.
Duplication, you repeat.

Mirrors in particular form a recurring motif—they are dangerous, they invite solipsism. And yet, the characters are drawn to mirrors and reflections as they try to understand themselves and each other, even mirroring one another in their movements and speech: “We are each other’s mime.”

I left for last what I admired most: Frith’s effortless and often inventive use of form. About half of the poems in the collection are sonnets, which includes two sonnet sequences (“Corona: After-image” and “Le Temps Perdu”) and a sonnet redoublé (“The Neighbor’s Rose”). There are also several villanelles and a sestina, with the rest being free verse, Frith being equally at ease in both free verse and form. I particularly admired the sonnet redoublé “The Neighbor’s Rose” which I think of as the center piece of the collection, and the two terza rima sonnets, “Mourners in Half Light” and “Birch,” where the use of tercets rather than quatrains creates a constant feeling of being off-balance and impelled towards to the next stanza by the rhyme. In “Sestina: After Muses,” if the form’s strict pattern of six interlaced end-words wasn’t constraint enough, Frith constrains herself further by making the six end-words share the same two rhymes. The effect of the constantly rhyming end-words is suffocating, hypnotic, almost deranging—which is exactly what the poem is about, so that sound and sense are perfectly in accord. Likewise, the repeating lines of the villanelle “Airless” reinforce and reenact the circularity of the argument in which the two characters are trapped: the narrator admits that “we circle” and “we’ve lost our plot” and yet they keep on going in circles, both in the argument and in the villanelle.

The poems of two for a journey find words for subtle and elusive registers of feeling even as they grapple with the difficulty of communication itself. Like the love they celebrate, the poems in this volume will linger with the reader, “ringing like an un-struck bell.”

____________

Nausheen Eusuf is a doctoral student in English at Boston University. She holds an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and her work has appeared in Acumen, Mezzo Cammin, Raintown Review, Spillway, and other journals. A chapbook titled What Remains was recently published by Longleaf Press.

THE DOG

The six of us look as usual but we are all dogs
Around that Christmas table of 1999. My sister
Carves with the concentration of a sculptor
Trying to free the angel from stone. This is usual.

My brother carries the turkey to table
Losing a wing. This is usual. My daughters
Discuss whether Handel’s Messiah or Christmas
Music from around the world should be played.

This is usual. I pour the water, spilling water,
My husband pours the wine with expertise. This is
Usual. What is not usual: a year ago, Christmas ’98,
We were fifteen, now we are six. Experiencing

The long table as more than half empty. We look
As usual; shellshock does not show on the face.
We strip flesh from bone. We pass the dressing.
We eat. We drink. The modern part of us understands

That the rest of the family will not arrive. It under-
Stands that the house is silent because no children
Play downstairs. That Santa will not come, that Baby
Jesus has grown up fast, that since last Christmas

He’s been crucified, has become God, Who has reverted
To Yahweh, Who is out to teach us a hard lesson: death,
Divorce, estrangement. But the dog. The dog part of us
Has its ears up. It listens for a familiar motor, listens

For the back door to open, listens for the familiar
Footsteps, listens for the voices downstairs. All through
Dinner the dog is poised to run and jump and lick,
The dog is about to go crazy with joy.

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
Tribute to Canadian Poets

YOUR VILLAGE

slipknot, aerosol

or invertebrate, a thing
spineless

drawn out in sections and rewired
to complete the circuit

hot light
in each alcove, insomniac
the green yellow eyes

of a cat, blinking
in the dark

nothing put to sleep.

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
Tribute to Canadian Poets

THE EX-WORLD

Death had seemed so abrupt to X,
like a TV show she loved being cancelled,
or a pet lipstick color discontinued.

Of course X knew these were minor examples!
Their minority let X think about death.
By now she’d lived through so many

new shows just a hue different from old ones
and new lipsticks causing a shade of mourning
for colors that would never be made again,

at least in her lifetime, she thought,
the end isn’t sudden at all—
why, it begins back with the first x-ing out.

Death wasn’t an ending, it was a transfer!
Cancellation by discontinuation,
she was crossing into the next world.

Disappearing through the border was
a bit like a passport check.
“What does the X stand for?”

the officer usually said at her customs-of-the-mind,
and she made up all sorts of names:
Example, Exonerate, Exfoliate.

Then the officer would point to the Exit
and watch her go. She seemed to dematerialize,
but instead made an entrance on the other side

in an alternate shade of her self.
X cared just a bit less about this world
each time some little thing she loved got crossed out.

Some tiny cells of her own disappeared
with the end of “Zoom Maroon” and “Toast of New York.”
Like Get Smart and The Avengers

her re-makes were never quite the same.
Yet fading piqued her curiosity:
Ex means examine, too,

each layer peeling off
its own thinny-thin translucency
like values of moonlight.

Which do you prefer, the sun or the moon?
Which one, LIFE or DEATH?
The thing clearly seen—or the thing in mystery?

Well, it’s time for mystery, X thought,
even though you’ve always moved past the spot
by the time you’ve marked it.

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
Tribute to Canadian Poets