Thursday Poems: Dooms of Love Grayed In

You would think that since my day job ended last week, I would have had ample time to find a poem this week, and that I would for once not be tired while I did so, but life is nothing if not a constant nuisance, a child made for the trampling of plans, expectations, hopes and dreams with equal dispassionate ease. Which is to say that I’m only getting to it now, and if that weren’t insult enough, I am not here to showcase one poem but two.

It may be because I was sitting here in my chair nodding off, or because my housemate is playing his guitar and singing in the next room, making it hard to focus on each line, but I found myself drifting in and out of these poems, occasionally caught and tangled again on a beautiful line or sharp thought, and so by the time I was done, I didn’t feel up to reviewing either work – my father moves through dooms of love by E. E. Cummings or Grayed In by Martha Collins – in full. They had meshed in a weird way in my skull, a fact I think would please Collins in particular, with her penchant for presenting simultaneous possibilities in the same moment – things are always about to happen happening happened, falling (still) rising, etc.

Her poem begins:

1

Snow fallen, another going

gone, new come in, open

the door:

                  each night I grow

young, my friends are well

again, my life is all

before me,

                   each morning

I close a door, another door.

That second stanza is electrifying; I sat up in my chair, tried to recover my breath. I love it for its contradiction, growing young with time, but also for its aching delusional optimism — too often I feel just the opposite, that each night marks a closing, not an opening. But it’s true as well that all life is before you all the time, and that is a thought to treasure.

Collins is fond of playing not just with words and spacing but also time, linear constructions, place and self in a kind of breathless cascade down the page. It doesn’t always work for me, personally, although that could be the tiredness talking, but the speed with which she diverges from one stanza to the next can be jarring.

For example, we go from this:

6

down buildings walls houses
schools, no one building only

bombing, months of little in,
now nothing no one out, only

down: bodies arms legs in Gaza

to this next section, with no connecting tissue offered:

7

On this day, this birthday, I wish
myself for the first time (who
would be a child again?) back

at that dining room table with
him, his years of little more less
back,

Everything weaves together in this poem and even if it didn’t capture me a hundred percent of the time, the moments it did were frequently stunning. Her imagery though sparse never fails to conjure a complete and striking picture. At the same time as I was reading through this poem and my housemate was singing and I was thinking I should probably go to bed and leave this for tomorrow, I saw Cummings’ superbly titled poem and dove into it.

It begins:

my father moved through dooms of love 
through sames of am through haves of give, 
singing each morning out of each night 
my father moved through depths of height

Typically, I’ve struggled with older, classical poetry. I often find it to be archaic in its formulation, or overly sentimental, etc. This poem, however, is unique in that the language Cummings uses is so singular, the phrases so adroit in pairing juxtaposing concepts or emotions like the titular “dooms of love”, that for once I wasn’t obsessing over the rhyming metre. Many poets twist themselves into knots with rhyme, taking the poem in a direction it doesn’t want to go purely to achieve the desired couplet, but I didn’t notice that here and if I did, wouldn’t care anyway – how could I when joy burgeons out of this poem so strongly?

Yes, it can become a bit much at times, but it’s worth it to move through “griefs of joy” with “wrists of twilight”, “singing desire into being” as “septembering arms of year extend.” That last phrase almost split my skin with delight I grinned so fucking hard. It’s so goddamn perfect. Nothing more need be said to bring that picture to life, and more than that, it’s such an efficient marriage of time and image to take us into the next stage of the poem, of his father’s life.

Both poems tonight are exemplary in their deployment of language, their dissection of time and place and personhood, albeit in different ways; though both most clearly deserve to be looked at on their own, I can’t bring myself to regret the way exhaustion spliced their oddities into one. The overall effect was is will always be beautiful.