Red Letter Poem #205

 Red Letter Poem #205

 

 

 

 

We Know

 

 

The time will come, we know, when one of us,

catching a summer chill,

takes on the fulltime, lifelong chore of being ill;

or something sidesteps all that fuss,

some blow we won’t have leisure to discuss—

one absent-minded footfall on a hill,

or too close to a cougar’s kill.

Soon or late, one will prove the obvious.

 

The other, paperwork and speeches done, will come

home to the thought of home, wanting a drink,

a kiss, not to be there another year or twenty.

In that too spacious minimum,

at least for a time there will be time to think

back over plenty.

 

 

                        ––Charles O. Hartman

 

 

 

In her essay "Disruption, Hesitation, Silence," Louise Glück wrote: “I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem.  I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence.  The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary.”  It seems to me that Charles O. Hartman has taken her suggestion to heart.  He has crafted here an elegant, if painfully reticent, sonnet; but the reason for the poem, the constituents of that hovering “we”, and the fearful apprehension that is propelling this speaker’s train of thought––little of this is addressed outright.  The artfulness of the piece serves to both reassure and undermine the reader, all at once––which, to my mind, is a fitting response to the precarious moment being contemplated.  Though the poem commences with a line in iambic pentameter (and certainly the meditation beginning to unfold does call to mind the sort of discourse Shakespeare relished), its rhythms then become more unpredictable; we find ourselves on a stormier sea.  And while the poem steadies us with the regularity of its stately rhyme scheme, the barometer of unseen forces is plunging and I can’t help feeling that, at any moment, our little boat could capsize.  “It is analogous to the unseen for example,” Glück went on to say, “to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete.  Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole. . .”.  I imagine the late great poet smiling as her fellow-practitioners, like Charles, go on inventing new ways of approaching that emotional whirlwind, establishing that core silence within their poems.

 

It's been some time since Charles’ New & Selected Poems (Ahsahta Press) made its appearance; and perhaps you, as I, have been waiting for a new collection from this wonderfully-adept, musically-inventive poet.  Having previously featured poems in the Letters from his manuscript-in-progress, I was delighted by the news that Downfall of the Straight Line, his eighth poetry collection, will make its debut from Arrowsmith Press this very week.  Because of the poet’s nuanced style––conjuring much more in our minds than the poem ever specifies––I look forward to engaging with each new text.  And how many provocative phrases are echoing inside today’s poem!  I literally feel swept away by the cascade of l’s, by the fragile iambic heartbeat that returns with: “the fulltime, lifelong chore of being ill”.  And how adroitly he avoids a head-on reckoning with that most devastating of fears: sudden loss of the beloved––“or something sidesteps all that fuss,/ some blow we won’t have leisure to discuss”.  To love someone deeply is to know that, sometime along the hazy path ahead, one of you will be forced to mourn the other––“to prove the obvious”: that our mortality is far more than a literary device, and this fate makes no exceptions.  “We know”, the poem tells us––but do we really, or do we tend to engage in intellectual conceits and artful gestures to blunt the force of that knowledge?  And then, as if it were simply unbearable to contemplate the death itself, our protagonist skips right away to the aftermath of the funeral, coming home to an empty apartment, buffering sorrow perhaps with a drink, not yet prepared to allow reality to sink in. 

 

Just now, after stopping to read the poem yet again, I felt compelled to set language aside––to stand and simply look out at the day.  And there: my wife, on her hands and knees, out back in the garden, planting alstroemeria.  The utter pleasure visible on her face; her hands caked with dirt––as she’s done with abandon since she was a girl.  And when I return to the keyboard, to Charles’ lovely bruise of a poem, this is what I am experiencing: an elegy for the plenitude we, too often, only comprehend in hindsight.  A great bell has been struck––not within the borders of the piece but somewhere outside it, somewhere in the speaker’s life we are not privy to in this reserved and well-appointed sonnet.  We are taken though, by the waves of reverberations as they slowly fade, until only a deep ache remains.

 

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

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https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

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