11.4.14

Something I love about poetry is its ability to surprise us with how we feel, even if we didn't know it. One of my favorite quotes is from Adrienne Rich: "Poems are like dreams; in them you put what you don't know you know", and the opposite end seems to be true as well. In them we find what we didn't know we were looking for. 

Sometimes, they can make us feel with very simple structures: There is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier by Matthew Rohrer

There is absolutely nothing lonelier
than the little Mars rover
never shutting down, digging up
rocks, so far away from Bond street
in a light rain. I wonder
if he makes little beeps? If so
he is lonelier still. He fires a laser
into the dust. He coughs. A shiny
thing in the sand turns out to be his.

Sometimes the feeling is more complex, developed more slowly: The Burnt-out Spa by Sylvia Plath

An old beast ended in this place:

A monster of wood and rusty teeth.

Fire smelted his eyes to lumps

of pale blue vitreous stuff, opaque

as resin drops oozed from pine bark.

The rafters and struts of his body wear

their char of karaul still. I can't tell

how long his carcass has foundered

  under

the rubbish of summers, the black-

  leaved falls. 

Now little weeds insinuate

soft suede tongues between his bones.

His armorplate, his topped stones

are an esplanade for crickets. 

I pick and pry like a doctor or

Archaeologist among

iron entrails, enamel bowls,

the coils and pipes that made him

    run.

The small dell eats what ate it once. 

And yet the ichor of the spring

proceeds clear as it ever did

from the broke throat, the

   marshy lip.

It flows below the green and white

baulstrade of a sag-backed bridge.

Leaning over, I encounter one

blue and improbable person

Framed in a basketwork of cattails.

O she is gracious and austere,

seated beneath the toneless water!

it is not I, it is not I. 

No animal spoils on her green door-

   step.

And we shall never enter there

where the durable ones keep house.

The stream that hustles us

Neither nourishes nor heals. 

Much like the speaker may discover his own loneliness or whereabouts in the text, the speaker seems to see herself/not-herself in the water, and is surprised. The gulf between the speaker and her "blue and improbable" double seems to be the mirror between the broken reality and the "durable" imagination or memory. I love the lushness of this work (I'm a huge Plath fan, that's no secret), and things like "iron entrails, enamel bowls" wants to become "enamel bowels" and flesh out the inside of the thing that was with an allusion to its purpose. 

This is something I come back to when I wonder why I seek out poetry and continue to try and share it.