A Note On Lisa Zaran’s Poem, “Girl”

 Girl 

by Lisa Zaran

She said she collects pieces of sky, 

cuts holes out of it with silver scissors, 

bits of heaven she calls them. 

Every day a bevy of birds flies rings 

around her fingers, my chorus of wives, 

she calls them. Every day she reads poetry 

from dusty books she borrows from the library, 

sitting in the park, she smiles at passing strangers, 

yet can not seem to shake her own sad feelings. 

She said that night reminds her of a cool hand 

placed gently across her fevered brow, said 

she likes to fall asleep beneath the stars, 

that their streaks of light make her believe 

that she too is going somewhere. Infinity, 

she whispers as she closes her eyes, 

descending into thin air, where no arms 

outstretch to catch her.

In response to a question as to the meaning of “descending into thin air.”

“*Descending* into thin air”is meant to describe her *falling* asleep. We descend into sleep. We lose consciousness. We fall into unconsciousness. When conscious she seeks companionship, animate or inanimate rendered meaningful via her imagination:

pieces of sky, bits of heaven;

bevy of birds, chorus of wives;

smiles at passing strangers;

night is a cool hand on her fevered brow;

night streaks of light make her feel she has a purpose, that she’s going somewhere.

Infinity is her belief in the limitlessness of what she can be stimulated to imagine. She constitutes herself as best she can by her imagination, with what she can imaginatively surround herself.

Come night and sleep and that is lost, her imagination perforce must fail her. So she descends into non-sustaining thin air—in contrast with her collecting pieces of the sky, bits of heaven—where there is no recourse to what her imagination can do for her, no arms outstretched to catch her, in contrast to night reminding her of a cool hand.

If she were to ascend, that would connote something positive for her in losing imaginative consciousness, which would cut against the meaning of the poem.

On David Berman’s Poem “Coincidence”

Coincidence

David Berman

For Mildred Nash

 

Coincidence.  Perhaps coincidence

Explains it all.  Why look far out, in deep

For mystical solutions to make sense

Of how a dream disturbed more than my sleep—

A dream in which you sat bolt upright on

A Windsor chair and wore a long blue dress

(Ornamented with a white chiffon)

And on your visage bore a dark distress

And said your dog was dead?  When I awoke,

I thought the dream an impetus to phone,

And when I did, the first words that you spoke,

Through sobs, were that your cat had died.  Your tone

Was as it had been in my dream, which plain

Coincidence tries too hard to explain?

So “plain coincidence” tries to work too hard to explain the similarities between the content of the dream and the subsequent conversation. 

It’s paradoxical. 

Coincidence is typically the simplest explanation for such similarities. It dispels less straightforward explanations that defy the occurrence of simple unlikely off chance events. 

So poems’ end inverts the introductory surmise as to the explanatory power of coincidence.

The surmise:

Coincidence.  Perhaps coincidence

Explains it all. 

but then at the end:

Your tone

Was as it had been in my dream, which plain

Coincidence tries too hard to explain?

So aren’t we finally left then with an explanation that in an ironic sense doesn’t have to try as hard as coincidence?

Ironic because while penetrating “the deep For mystical solutions” is beyond doing, it works less hard than the ready to hand, immediate explanatory power of coincidence that requires no further probing.

But there’s one caveat to this inversion, namely the concluding question mark.

So as the poem has it, it’s a question whether “Coincidence tries too hard to explain?”.

A Reading Of The Unaccompanied, A Poem By Simon Armitage

Wandering slowly back after dark one night

above a river, toward a suspension bridge,

a sound concerns him that might be a tune

or might not: noise drifting in, trailing off.

 

Then concerns him again, now clearly a song

pulsing out from the opposite bank, being sung

by chorusing men, all pewter-haired or bald,

in the function suite of a shabby hotel.

Above their heads a conductor’s hand

draws and casts the notes with a white wand.

 

Songs about mills and mines and a great war,

about mermaid brides and solid gold hills,

songs from broken hymnbooks and cheesy films.

 

Then his father’s voice rising out of that choir,

and his father’s father’s voice, and voices

of fathers before, concerning him only,

arcing through charged air and spanning the gorge.

He steps over the cliff edge and walks across.

—————

I wrote this to someone: 

 I think though that from this back and forth I may be able to put this poem together without getting into all its subtleties, meanings and means.  “Wandering,” as I’d noted, suggests his aimlessness. But he’s wandering “slowly back,” which qualifies his lack of direction. 

Back suggests he’s got something in mind. He’s slowly moving back to the place he came from. He hears sounds that increasingly concern him, in both senses of concern. They’re inside his head. 

They start off vaguely and then grow in focused clarity. In what he hears with his inward ear are seemingly images and fragments of memories from his life; they are specific and concrete. 

The clarity of what he inwardly hears intensifies when he hears his father’s and forefathers’ voices, as they rise for him above all else and fill the air and span the divide between whom and what he was and  whom and what he now is, that very distance suggested by the “gorge.” 

Are they singing to him, speaking to him; has the music ended? We don’t know. But we can infer they’re beckoning to him as they concern only him, the culmination and resolution of all the concern running through the poem. 

Now, what was somewhat aimless wandering has become decisive movement, captured by the direct active verbs of the last line, “steps over” and “walks across.” 

He walks over the suspension bridge towards what before he had walked over it away from—towards home, it seems most likely, the voices of his progenitors bringing him to some sense of himself and taking him home. He transports himself.  

A Modest Proposal Re Israel And Palestinian Terror, Actually Not Modest But Not Absurd

Here is an argument for a radically proactive approach to dealing with Palestinian terrorism as embodied in entities like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. 

I find the underlying logic hard to refute: why live under constant large scale threats from them; why not change the rules under which the status quo continues, a status quo that means living with periodic rocket barrages, which, for now, makes Southern Israel a periodic target, which allows these groups to rearm and, indeed, improve their munitions? 

What country with the capability to do otherwise would agree to live with ongoing bombardment, among other imperilling threats? 

Is the status quo the only alternative, given that for these organizations, which are gaining political power against a sclerotic PLO, Israel’s existence itself is a zero sum issue, no compromise to be brooked?

Isn’t it so, as I believe Golda Meir said, paraphrase, “If they disarm, then we’ll disarm. If we disarm, then they’ll destroy us.” 

https://www.meforum.org/64463/how-israel-can-solve-its-gaza-problem