by Marianne Boruch

The American Poetry Review, September/October 2006

. . . don't pick it up. The law of gravity
is the law of art.
                              — Karl Shapiro

Before there's a thing at all — fire station, airplane, bicycle, poem — there's probably a blueprint. Before that, a drawing in a sketchbook — on the verge of, about to. That's a beginning, at least a way to think toward roof or wing, a turning wheel or something as quick as metaphor in a poem, wily wayward device for digression or voila! one thing leading to another as structure makes meaning strange and immediate and possible. And dense perhaps, the hand with a pencil suddenly filling up the page, a roof turning into a gable, a wheel linked to a chain and then to another wheel, or metaphor forgetting a while, for how many stanzas, it's like anything at all. Of course, I'm already stymied at this X-marks-the-spot, already lifting too much. It's too heavy. "Everything is made out of everything," Leonardo da Vinci records in his journal in what must be half praise, half exhaustion. So say this thing is a poem. I have to get smaller, down to the simplest definition. A poem is a box, then — see it in that sketchbook? In the hovering blue of that blueprint? A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in.

For safe keeping. Okay. Or it's a time capsule, or even a catapult, for poets with more public ambitions, overarching, or just arching enough. (Sorry, there it goes, getting bigger....) So again, just this: as a box, the poem contains. As a box, it is carried place to place. And closes. And has secrets. And can weigh quite a bit. You pack and repack it languidly or with exact intention. Or with hopeful indifference (back up, see languidly, again, and float there with a little more gravity). You forget to include your favorite things in that poem, or you don't forget to forget, on purpose, putting old habits of beauty aside each time, so it's new. Maybe it has to be new and sound different. It still weighs a lot. You can hardly lift it to the table, the porch, the car. But the truth is, you can always open the box. You can always look down into it, and take things out, and rearrange its not-at-all-like-little-furniture in there, the whole time lifting it, about to lift. Because the poem is lighter now; it's going up. And now, it is up and out of your hands. You can hardly make it out up there, but you know the shape of its shadow down here where we live. It darkens the ground.

I need that darkness first because that's the happy outcome and perhaps the demanding, default position, start or finish. Let's face it: a poem matters because it's about eternal things — death, love, knowledge, time — however these are disguised. The great subjects are endless, never used up. But each waits there in shade. Each weighs at least four thousand pounds. Too much. It's awful, really. How can we stand it? Such melodrama could be — is! — off stage, pacing in the wings, heavy-handed moves ready to prove a point, certain half-seconds clenching up as if underscored three times with a thick black pencil. Maybe. But at times it's so believable, up there in the air. It's impossible, isn't it? Getting such mysterious, monstrous things to lift and keep going? Question: how the hell to do that? "There is no art to flying," said Wilbur Wright, "only the problem of flying." So there are ways, I suppose. Or maybe, for starters, it really is a matter of birdseed, Thomas Edison as a boy convincing another boy that eating a handful or two would make him smart about it all. He'd abruptly know how, and launch himself right out the window into perfect flight. Come on, just a few! I imagine Edison telling that kid, thinking like a wise guy, but scared a little, past that, almost believing him self. And is it that simple, the old certainty that poems beget poems, something I've heard and absorbed and insisted for others, for years? We read all our lives toward poems we wish to write: black oil sunflower Dickinson and Bishop, thistle seed Hopkins and Whitman, the hard suet of Jeffers or Larkin or Kees or Plath. That work humbles and empowers, two things at once. Then at the window, looking down to our own city and mountain and farmland: to personal grief, into our own wonder about anything — this hesitation, this screwing up of courage, forgetting for a moment that we've eaten at all. Because our own hunger is crucial.

But crucial to what in poems? Their dark? Their light? What presses down, or lifts up? Or in Leonardo's terms, is it related to weight, this thing that is "corporal" and "changes its position unwillingly," is stable and stays with us, and lasts forever? Or is our hunger something he calls force, which is terrible and angelic, utterly "spiritual," he writes, the "true seed in sentient bodies," its energy always a "violence," fortuitous and transforming and fleeting? It desires only "flight from itself" And "death," he adds. This "force" that "willingly consumes itself. ...From small beginnings, it slowly becomes larger, a dreadful, marvelous power."

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Open any book about flying, and one reads first about angle. Of wing, yes, but the ascent into and up — the "angle of attack," pilots call it — and downwards eventually, even that cautionary no-doubt-about-it sideways, almost idling, just living a life for most of the journey. On the instrument panel — that airborne dash — so many small, important-looking faces loom up, clocking altitude then "heading" — the direction you thought you were going. Then the "turn and slip" one to balance, to stay put or at least level, by the old-fashioned charm of needle and ball; certainly the straight ahead speed, the vertical speed, each has its own dial and is busy. You can get such a thing in a kit these days, for as little as 10 grand to do a whole airplane in wood or metal, or composite which is strictly man-made. You can't predict how long it will take though you can make a W.A.G., a WAG — a wild ass guess — says the book I'm reading about such vessels called "homebuilts," all put together, it seems, right down the street in anyone's neighborhood. But how many of those planes lie half finished, for years in how many garages, this minute? I'll venture a WAG: hundreds, maybe thousands. And someone might be walking through the yard now, thinking to turn on the light in there. Someone thinking to do some sanding, some welding, a little work on it; the wing needs to be set in place, just so.

Because the angle focuses everything. The incline, the turn, the deepest human wish: to rise, to get out of bed. Then later, the second great longing, to be dark and descend. We'll never get over those two brothers at Kitty Hawk, the hard sand there autumn after autumn into winter, four years of failure and half-failure, those Wright boys from Dayton; so far across the country, men who never married, self-taught mechanics and bicycle makers, their hunger large and dogged as their patience. In the old photographic stills, one is running, the other so careful about balance, shifting his weight in their homebuilt, a glider, then a motorized glider aloft one day in 1903, four flights' worth, those 12; 13, then 15, then the famous 59 seconds, an honest-to-god off the ground moving through space, on its own. But so ingenious, that they angled the wing by way of the bird, by way of its delicate, steely wise, hollow-boned pressure.

And poetry? That remains to be seen, but angling up like that, oddly lighter than air, it alters what one sees and is — looking down and across now, listening for something else which might resemble the silent largely selfless focus right before any poem kicks in. "Something, somebody, is trying to speak through me," Adrian Stoutenberg begins her "Séance," already in a forward pitch through patient guesswork.

Ant or ape or a great grandmother,
perhaps a voice even older,
perhaps the sea, perhaps a throat in the sea.
perhaps a shape without eyes or thumbs,
dust maybe . . .

To such an eye, by way of such distance, all can seem altered, multiple and odd. Everything is made of everything. But there are rhythms and patterns and all starts simply, with one word or two or three. But — news flash, key point — this "lift" engineers talk about, the way air pushed down by the wing's slant must push up and up, it's physics, it's Newton's third law of motion — "for every action, an equal and opposite reaction," and thus the rise, this heavy thing lighter, abruptly, into air. But what force pushes down in a poem? Which in turn, turns furious, pushing up?

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"Sundays too my father got up early...." So Robert Hayden begins his well-known poem, "Those Winter Sundays" with something remembered, pretty large and already underway. Sundays too, he says, as if we know about the other days, the boy, this son listening from a nearby room, from half-dream perhaps to his father's daily ritual in "the blueblack cold" as he fires up the stove to heat the house. "Sundays too my father got up early. . . ." So Robert Hayden begins his well-known poem, "Those Winter Sundays" with something remembered, pretty . large and already underway. Sundays too, he says, as if we know about the other days, the boy, this - s{)n listening from a nearby room, frQm half-dream perhaps to his father's daily ritual in "the blueblack cold" as he fires up the stove to heat the house. Already underway: you can hear that lift in the cool assertion about this supposed day of rest — "Sundays too" — no commas for the natural pauses after "Sundays" and "too," the of course, of course of statement pushing here, this heavy thing, habit, made lighter by its seemingly automatic again-and-again, day-after-day. We are stopped, nevertheless, by the emphatic semi-inversion, a press downward on the wing — flying directly now into the wind for greater lift — with that structural decision to put the day first, in that clipped near-shorthand way, a trochee here, the poem launched on that initial no-doubt-about-it heavy stress. After all, it's not "On Sundays, my father got up early," the graceful rise of a more iambic beginning, and definitely not the prosaic get-the-job-done "My father got up early on Sundays." This is fierce. There's strain in the phrasing — "Sundays too" — a resistance that releases, one line later, the lingering, triple-weighted "blueblack cold," this "blueblack" suddenly older than anything we've thought about for a while, the two words flush against each other, as a kenning works, right of out of Beowulf, its "cold" flooding father, son, the memory itself.

It's the final two lines of this poem that show its true mettle though one can't praise enough how this steady unsonnet sonnet moves toward that closure, accounting for the father's pre-dawn labors — his cracked and aching hands, his polishing of shoes — but never sentimentally. From the start, the harder truths — including the boy who speaks "indifferently" to this father — are not airbrushed out.

I'd wake to hear the wild splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house...

And so on, to the well-known ending of this poem that takes those hard truths and weighs them so hopelessly — "What did I know, what did I know / Of love's austere and lonely offices?" — lines often recited, committed to memory, and for good reason; they stand by themselves. And maybe it's natural that we'd cherish and roar them out loud, then and now. I'm remembering again, years ago in Indianapolis, a car making its way through snowy streets, a handful of us in there, caught up like this. Out of nowhere, those words. And again, just this summer, in a friend's kitchen two states away, those lines in the air. They keep doing that, coming back. And maybe not why, — that's a matter for more private places — but how exactly?

The given, bony rise in any question — the open, wondering built-in aerial view offered by that particular sentence structure — immediately gives these lines their initial internal power, and the repetition too, so by its second utterance — "What did I know, what did I know..." — all is rattled and urgent, secret really, this speaker fully unto himself now. No longer directly hearing, we are suddenly secret ourselves, just overhearing. And what do we catch there, past lament? He stares again into that lost flash of childhood: "...what did I know / Of love's austere and lonely offices?" One word, or two. So a poem starts, and finishes. Austere has to have one of the most violently beautiful effects in English, distant and vulnerable at once, public and hidden, held upright by enormous pressure, inside and out. And here, its sound — its iambic lift — the second syllable stressed, adds a brief and expansive counter-rhythm. We hear in that both contraction and expansion.

But it's offices here that compels, and is brilliant, a word going straight into ancient practice. I remember a young priest in my childhood parish at dawn, reading the matins from his Divine Office, walking the streets as he read, never looking up as we biked by to early Mass. Something vast, nearly incomprehensible looms up in that word. In Hayden's poem, it brings humility — what's been done and done again; one merely partakes of that. But nobility's there too — ditto, done and done, this time into tradition and so heavy, we no longer even know how to weigh it. The power of a single word can be staggering. And finding it, trying to figure out why it works — really why other choices do not — can take a long time and is the writer's most essential, brain-fracturing job. After all, a poem is a box to put things in, and with that comes the task of taking things out, then it's all over again, putting the radiant things, however dark they are,_back in. Which is to say, in my friend's kitchen this summer, we gratefully remembered the poem, singing out those last two lines. And offices — I blurted out as any Catholic would, even one as long-lapsed as I am — that's great in there, isn't it? Offices! I mean, what if — god, here's a terrible thought — what if he had written promises instead? "…love's austere and lonely promises"? And my friend, her face suddenly screwed up in that funny gag-me way, her index finger already miming that half-way-down-the-throat thing.

Because "promises" is awful for about a half dozen reasons. Which, of course, makes at least that number of ways to prove "offices" so remarkable here. But it's not a matter of meter really, since both words are dactyls, three syllables whose first comes down hard before moving forward unstressed, first emphatic then that suggestion of falling, "a descent" Paul Fussell calls it, the critic who has written with such smart crankiness about these things. This downward move is especially dramatic against the rising shape — and hopeful, one might read that — of the line's earlier words, austere itself and "love's" — no — Of love's, both iambic moves, stepping lightly up, into the stressed second syllable. Or if you hear a spondee there — two equal beats, Of love's — it only deepens the gravity, those two beats stretching time, Fussell's claim for that particular rhythm, suggesting weariness, he says, or fullness. But the words promises or offices are metrically similar; the difference in their power must lie elsewhere, maybe in what a pilot considers the four elements that keep any plane going: lift and weight, thrust and drag. So the airborne wish, sometimes for thousands of miles.

Mileage — and certainly altitude — in a poem is harder to gauge though one can start any first line in Seattle and land in Chicago or Philadelphia, most likely the same day. And — considering metrics again — the downward press, that first syllable's trochaic/dactylic hit that colors the very end and beginning of this poem, lifting and darkening in near equal amounts. Drag, though, is an aerodynamic force that resists the object as it moves through a fluid, which both air and water are, and which, I'd argue for a long time, thought is too a fluid, a near viscous dream. To land in any of these, one needs drag, which is to say, the plane routinely drops down its lumbering wheels not only to soften the impact but simply to add a needed baseline trouble, to get heavier and bigger at closure, thus to slow this last possible moment of the journey.

Words themselves drag behind them plenty of history, numerous other identities brought to the mix. And poets worry everything from the start. So back to promises vs. offices. At first glance, the former has, well, promise. Anyone might promise a lot or a little: to pick up ice cream and avocadoes at Payless, to stop the mail for a few days, to make dinner, to keep a secret, to stay married. But the word can feel coy, even precious, especially following any reference to love, as it would in Hayden's poem if we forced our bad revision. A shaky choice — promises — and pretty much predictable, evoking the classic June-wedding froth or worse, that pink icing turning petulant ala but you made a promise, says Tiffany to Chad (or Ryan or Trevor), wringing her hands in Days of Our Lives or The Guiding Light (my mother's favorite, but perhaps long off the air). So melodrama is more than a suggestion of danger: With certain words, like fraught, it's fraught with it, too willfully weighted, too much drag, I suppose, and not enough thrust to keep going, however right and graceful it is to hesitate here at the end of Hayden's poem where threat is genuine. Because there's already so much falling buried in those key words and — double whammy — closure itself supplies a natural big bang and weight written right into the contract of the "meter making argument" that Emerson claimed a decent poem always has to be. In short, word choice is a tricky business. Such endless shifting Orville Wright needed at first, his body this way and that, to fly that delicate vessel! One needs drag, but not too much; thrust, but of a certain kind. It must surprise, however small that messing now with the angle of the wing to bring it all down, and in. Where it continues its haunting.

Offices then — because at heart, that word hasn't quite the heavy-handed personal confinement that "promises" does, ticking off and getting (look-at-me!) credit for its duty-bound minutes and hours. Instead, "offices" goes back and back, past counting, almost courtly in its historical reserve, and will go on without, even in spite of us, thank you very much — though not so very much. That's the lonely part, in part (lonely, yet another word with a first syllable stress in this line, its second syllable unstressed, just a shade or two going under, so Fussell might declare it all the more dark, the descent even steeper). Thus this poem, this huge shuttering machine is tiny, intricate — only 14 lines! — coming to a sudden, howbeit still moving stop.

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In Leonardo's journals, you can find many curious pages on flight. "I have divided the 'Treatise on Birds' into four books," he writes, this treatise not strictly on birds (though a great deal of it is wing work — flapping vs. gliding, taking off, coming down). He eventually gets to bats and fishes, flying machines of course and famously (their linen and sinew and pulleys, the staring figure drawn seated in the center between sticks and rope), then into the straight mechanics of such mechanics where many of us might blur, glaze over. Always though, "the heaviest part will become the guide of the movement." So watch out, I suppose, where exactly you put that part.

In the litany, one of our oldest literary shapes, where, and even when seems hardly a choice, that "heaviest part" just there at the start of each line and after that, it's like the astronauts' famous floating-through-air, their arms and legs flailing as they speed far away from gravity's pull. Thus one more of Leonardo's dictums on flight: "Those feathers... farthest away from their points of attachment will be the most flexible." I read flexible here as lighter, as more subtle, as the variation Ezra Pound claimed every form needs to escape its essential fixed point though it's exactly that shifting, back and forth, that makes art. "Repetition makes us feel secure," Robert Hass has written, "and variation makes us feel free." And it's hard not to think first of Whitman in this context, his reverence for, and brilliance at, these two sides of litany pushing out, then back, each line a miniature of the whole trip, keeping a kind of sweet stall here, back here, as the poem pushes forward.

But I'm not considering an overall habit. I'm thinking mid-poem, really, mid-flight where so much of the journey takes place. Which is to say for a moment I'm trading Whitman for T. S. Eliot, two you'd never find in the same bomb shelter though both would be alert and wary enough there, counting down water jugs and cans of beans to the last thirst and hunger ahead. In Eliot's "Four Quartets," the second one, the "East Coker" section, litany comes in abruptly, a surprise, not the given instrument it is for Whitman. It's a way for Eliot, already aloft, already up there, to hover soundlessly and still make noise. And because this is Eliot, we enter big, through pure incantation: "O dark dark dark," he writes, "they all go into the dark...." And so we have our anaphora, the repeated word in any litany, the fixed point to which at least some of those flexible tip-of-the-feather moves will return.

What's surprising in this section is how flexible those feathers are. Eliot is looser in one way than Whitman. The compulsion to return to that dark and dark is not so demanding, not the default setting every time as Whitman might do it. Eliot doesn't load the line as line so meticulously. And what's swallowed by this dark? Everyone, all, ie:

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors....

The accumulation here jumps categories, large groups of people, then how vast it gets with "Sun and Moon," then back to its daily inch by inch with "the Stock Exchange Gazette." Eliot's human beings are cast by where they work, high and low, and are far more generalized than Whitman's where a prostitute, say, has accessories and "draggles her shawl" as his sign painter carefully letters "in blue and gold." Still, the more specific Eliot gets, the more he simply moves — and the less he's characteristically ponderous. We get a little air, some release and sideways flight in that rapid but squarely paced shifting, that piling-up before it all goes "into the dark and dark" and finally into the "moment of darkness on darkness."

Eliot does something else to lift and hover. Suddenly cold takes over dark in that cadence — "and cold the sense," he writes. Then lost too — "and lost the motive for action." Steady, steady, we even rise on that move, a change in the repeat of dark — now this cold, this lost — a break in the weather, a new kind of breathing, more urgent. By it, we're upright, still gliding, before Eliot drops completely out of litany and into story as poets sometimes tend to it, on an extended image working sideways, both to evoke a moment out of human time and to make metaphor. He evokes the theater first, whose backdrop scenes go up, then vanish nightly, their "distant panorama" of "hills and trees" all "rolled away," and then his next great passage, where all disappears in the "underground train," London's subway, the tube, that fabled site of so much longing and symbol for this poet. There they sit, the city's blank staring citizens, and "behind every face" the "growing terror of nothing to think about...." Of course, we descend in the weight of that image. This is Eliot, after all, whose genius loved most the dark default of such things. In the meantime though, we were orbiting a little, and had that vision, looking with such sweep at everyone, at ourselves, so busy and doomed down there.

In fact, more ways exist to stay aloft, another set of creature ways to manage that. I know Leonardo was obsessed with birds, and stared them through. And the Wright brothers too kept watching gulls, taking notes, reportedly flapping their arms, bent at elbow and wrist — no, it was buzzards and gannets at Kitty Hawk that swooped and dove. But at Berkeley, not long ago, biologists glommed onto a less in-your-face flyer. They've made a very high tech mini-robot, a giant gnat — a fruit fly, really — calling it a "robofly" — to see how the smallest of animals do it, stay up there, minus the powerful wings of hawk or jet. Some insect strategies then, and here, one of their first techniques — the so-called "delayed stall" where tiny wings dash forward and up (something neither bird nor plane can do), the fiercest angle. And how fast? Very fast, but Robofly is slower and larger; the human eye can see it. And would Philip Larkin mind the thought of certain moves in his "Sad Steps" flush up against this airborne feat? This poem which initially moves off a 16th century sonnet from Sir Philip Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella" and that poet's own "sad steps" which evoke the moon, quickly becomes Larkin's own night-bound invention. I'm counting out his six tercets, three movements really, on one of the great subjects — time (our getting old, our looking back, our right here, right now, our way of going back and forth), not to mention the other perennial moments here — the early hour sky or how anyone might rise midway through sleep to pee. In this shift of high to low, sacred to profane, there's humor, its automatic buzz and rise. We know at once we're reading Larkin — not Eliot, not even Whitman. So maybe Robofly is semi-proper, a way of paying homage.

Larkin first gives us time and place. "Groping back to bed after a piss," he writes,

I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon's cleanliness.

Four o'clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky. There's
     something laughable about this....

Is this what anyone might see? The moon's up there, and clouds like "cannon smoke," and "roofs below." And heavy, clean, this stall, that won't let that moon go, this staring, quick, that keeps it coming (wings cutting forward, a steep, then steeper angle) in Larkin's pronouncements:

High and preposterous and separate—
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements!

That sudden angle, this "delayed stall," is mimed hard by the fragmentation here, more, by his precise jabs at definition, how-be-they wild and tongue-in-cheek. Real or imagined, it's still triumphant. Exclamation points, count them: four! They push everything higher, lighter. And the simple repetition — "of love... of art... of memory." (Knock on wood: here's the heft of litany again though shrunk down and in its locket.) That of of of cuts up at an urgent angle however playful. (Can you see that intricate fuzzy wired creature — moon or fruit fly or poem — hovering there? And so much bigger for it?) Such high invention to make real that moon, before the no comes, and "one shivers slightly, looking up there," the poet now dropping abruptly to a more level tone, shifting from his mock-heroics to something more felt and nagging about this moon. Which is to say, worlds sadder.

The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

In writing once about Auden, Larkin linked the words "funny" and "dreadful" — dreadful in its first straightforward meaning, ie: full of genuine dread. "High and preposterous," Larkin reminds us in his own poem, this "lozenge of love," calling up the "wolves of memory" and so many "immensements," none of which will "come again." So humor finds its weight in such an unlikely mix, and so that darker weight finds lift, fracturing itself endurable, even radiant for a moment. We find ourselves looking down and up and past that moon and its usual guises now, into a very different — and unsettling — expanse.

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In the history of flight, there are thousands of stories, and quite a few belong to the Wright brothers though one is legendary, coming out of their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. Two elements are memorable — an empty inner tube box, and Wilbur Wright leaning in the doorway, talking idly to a customer not too long after the century turned. I see him there. He's picked up the box. He's fiddling with it; it must feel good in his hands as he keeps talking, listening, nodding his head, turning the cardboard this way and that. Then, he's looking down. No, he's more than looking down. How this simple movement — his twisting the box — superimposed itself on the rigid wing of their not-yet-flying machine shows metaphor in its most heightened — and practical — moment. What thing is shaped as this thing is shaped? That's William Carlos Williams decades later, from his poem "Asphodel, that Greeny Flower," a question I've loved too much, and quoted too often, but it narrows to an absolute in poetic thinking: we learn by the leap, the comparison, the analogy; two unlikely things together make a third thing, and so we move forward. A wing could do this, Wilbur Wright must have thought, maybe vaguely at first, but more and more, it must have taken hold under the talk-talk about whatever, the storm last night, or the new brick work going in to make east 3rd a wider street, this deeper kind of mulling-over That runs on and on under the surface fact, almost by itself, the sort of lucky thing that comes to us, these glimpses. So poems are twisted too, drifting there, in progress regardless, kept alive even when those who write them are distracted, not particularly honed to the task.

As for aviation, Wright's fiddling that day was the key to "wing warping," the brothers' name for this great gift and innovation, so simple really, to solve the problem of control, their craft now too heavy and past the point one of them piloting could merely shift his weight left, right, forward, backward to will the plane through air and so avoid disaster. The Wrights' sketch and blueprint of the design was stunning. In it we see the beauty of pure form. And the plane itself seems almost whimsical now, the wings' edges made bendable by runs of two bicycle chains jerry-rigged to a couple of levers. But the point is this: what seemed forever rigid to everyone — the airplane wing — was not. And the larger point: was it really possible? Yes. We would fly.

To warp something then. To make flexible what all along was kept as rule, committed in the mind to stone: the very thought, even in theory, is a great relief, a lightening of both inside and outside pressure. Applied to poetry, sometimes it's dramatic, such warping, denoting a sea change in a poet's work, John Berryman's say, his messy and vernacular move to the Dream Songs from a more formal habit in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, or his Sonnets, a twisting of that inner tube box, a serious wing-warp. And the nature of that particular flight — its drag and thrust? its lift and weight? "A creepy, scorching book," Adrienne Rich wrote, reviewing it for The Nation. "He uses any conceivable tone of voice and manner to needle, wheedle, singe, disarm and scarify the reader." Can you see Orville Wright up there at his levers? The bicycle chain angling the wing just barely, tragedy averted by a couple of degrees. No crash this time. Not yet.

Because tragedy is all over the Dream Songs; its threat presses down on every line. Which is why, perhaps, we think of the deep play in these poems as a kind of resistance — Newton's counter-motion coming up by way of Berryman's comic brilliance. It's Larkin again, mixing dark and light, thrust and drag — to keep aloft and believable. "Life, friends, is boring," Berryman announces straight away in Dream Song 14 — "We must not say so...." But some of the pieces are less stagy, just painfully wry or simply edgy which is a balancing too. #29 is an example of this, taking on one of poetry's great subjects — regret, guilt, remorse, three curses of memory that make one curse in the poem. With characteristic dark grace, line to line, this poet twists and warps and finally convinces. Note the music here. Note Berryman's feel for a big-voice but tentative sound, a point/counterpoint managed by inversion, fable, surprise, omission.

There sat down, once, a thing in Henry's heart
so heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

How huge, then small this begins — There sat down, once — the cadence so familiar, as if this were the oldest story we have to tell. But where? In "Henry's heart" and so this very public utterance turns personal, private and "so heavy," this thing — too horrible to be named — and to prove that weight, a kind of piling up — years of this thing, "& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time...." This could be pure melodrama so easily, but it's rushed, its shutter speed so fast, even tiny decisions — quick! screw up the grammar, go slipperier, enjamb! enjamb! or use an ampersand, not the proper "and" — to loosen, to lighten before the line break quiets everything for a second, then the fall via so many hard single stresses: "Henry could not make good." So we're down — it's Fussell's lamenting spondee again — and seriously endstopped. Which is to say, real pause. Silence. Until — "Starts again always in Henry's ears / the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime." This is a large measure of Berryman's power, his willingness to move. His rapid juxtaposition makes weighty complexity here almost lace-like, delicate. Where to go? To the triggering agents, these bad charms — a cough, an odour, a chime — to bring this thing back.

His sleight of hand continues, this expert shifting — it's Berryman's famous hair-pin control of tone. It's wing warp taking us through time, his flashing in reverse to Italian sculpture in the next stanza, its profile's thousand year look of reproach unchanged. Next, it's the very clipped, the fragment, "(A)ll the bells:" — a colon placed after "bells," Berryman forcing an equation: "too late," he says. Under such a load, there's only retreat. "This is not for tears; / thinking." Then "but" — that word of sweet suspension, signal for every reverse turn, rise, second thought.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hack her body up
and hide the pieces where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

Juxtaposition, the bendable wing — we're up, then down — a long sentence undercut quick by a shorter one. Or the surprise of the misplaced prepositional phrase, severing a warmer, more expected rhythm — "Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up," a kind of startle, a small awkward leap in the line before the repeated phrase here, its automatic quieting the second time around. Nobody is ever missing. Violence cast into dream and bewilderment by metaphor — that third thing — in the secret half light that metaphor always is. And it's a draw now, the day just beginning, night still hanging on.

                                                                 •

Leonardo's notion that "the heaviest part will become the guide of the movement" seems reasonable and just, but is it? Certainly we feel for that weight as we write, writing toward it, at least our side vision alert for it. After all, gravity is one of the three basic forces on earth, earth itself its center because — I quote chemist Robert Wolke here — "the more mass a body has — the more particles of matter it contains — the stronger its aggregate attractive force would be. That's why," he points out, "when you jump off a ladder, earth doesn't fall upward to meet you." This is maybe the best argument I've seen for work whose center of gravity, its focus, is the world and not the self. We know that ladder, after all. We've fallen off many a time. Because it's the mysterious huge other out there that pulls us to itself. But this perhaps is another matter.

Meanwhile, there's that other Leonardo thing — weight vs. farce, weight so stable and unchanging, those huge subjects of poetry, for instance — love, death, knowledge, time — and force working through that weight, a more wily spirit, out and about, "in flight" and "transforming," terrible and angelic both, violent. The voice in a poem seems also to transform, to do this give and take, to draw itself through the heaviest part though often, and often effectively, it's not straight on, not an easy matter of calling up the lowest chords out of string section to make sense of the speechless moment after the car crash in some overwrought made-far-TV movie. Such a force, this voice, works more powerfully much of the time by inference, a sort of ruse, where we look away for a second, pretend this terrible thing is not the point, not really. Though it is. And I may be half-eyeing Larkin again, and perhaps Berryman in this since irony and outright humor work this sideways way. In either case, Leonardo's force becomes a lifting device to get whatever overwhelming ache and baggage across, making it less, not more, so less is mare. And then we're impossibly up there, in flight.

I don't know exactly how to approach what Emily Dickinsan did with her "flood subject," one of the great ones, death, which was everywhere in 1862 when she wrote so much, the Civil War upping its bloody count daily. Leonardo's weight here is surely in that fact — the end in store for all of us, a stable, immoveable element if there ever was one. But Dickinson, like Larkin and Berryman, is distracted, and in her best work refuses to belabor the obvious in any ponderous, expected way. There's her famous and unbelievably odd take on the deathbed scene, Poem # 465, with its fly — its fly! — as the key figure, its "Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—" that comes between the dying speaker and the light, until the windows fail, a run of image that would almost be whimsical if it weren't so dark.

Such oddity — if not comic, at least surreal — works because it isn't quite satire, which is to say, the speaker isn't grandstanding, isn't holding forth or looking down. That's not the force that makes this so chillingly accurate. When asked about his own use of humor during an interview with Robert Phillips of the Paris Review, Larkin was clear about the distinction: "to be satiric, you have to think you know more than anyone else. I've never done that."

Not knowing more, perhaps, but not responding to certain things in the same old, same old as everyone else: that might be the key, this force that Leonardo relished, a matter of surprise and angle. Which is to say, be just a little off — the bendable wing again — and so deflect. And invent something called flight. In Dickinson’s poem #467, what's going on seems, at first anyway, less dramatic. "We do not play on Graves," she begins, this we apparently a group of children, and this speaker the self-appointed leader of the group. The voice continues in that most super-rational, reasonable way that such children often have.

Because there isn't Room—
Besides—it isn't even—it slants
And People come—

And put a Flower on it—
And hang their faces so—
We're fearing that their Hearts will drop—
And crush our pretty play—

One can see instantly how this vessel stays in the air — pure pretending, ruse because surely the heaviest part of the poem cries out not so secretly: this is a grave, damn it. Dead people live here. We'll all get this address sooner or later. But Dickinson's pilot turns this so patiently, laying out reasons through the earnest explanation of a child impatient with the clueless adult who must stand there listening. "Besides—it isn't even— it slants..." we overhear. Such grounded certainty in the language, so painfully missing the point — which is the point, of course. But it's like Dickinson to tweak the darker vein here eventually. So we land, drawn back to the most dire fact, a more adult shadow suddenly on the language. And yes, back to Leonardo's heaviest part.

And so we move as far
As Enemies—away—
Just looking round to see how far
It is—occasionally—

It's that one last look, that "occasionally," that reweights — and lifts — every word here. As if we forgot what poetry is really about.

_____

Works Consulted

Berryman, John. 77 Dream Songs. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.
Da Vinci, Leonardo. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, edited and translated by Edward MacCurdy. NY: Braziller, 1954.
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970.
Eberhardt, Scott, and Anderson, David. "How Airplanes Work: A Physical Description of Lift," Aviation, February 1999.
Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems. NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962.
Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. NY: Random House, 1965.
Hass, Robert. Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry. NY: Ecco, 1984.
Hayden, Robert. Collected Poems. NY: Liveright, 1985.
Jakab, Peter L. Visions of a Flying Machine, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.
Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.
______. Required Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.
Phillips, Robert. "The Art of Poetry, no. 30" (interview with Philip Larkin), The Paris Review, no. 82, Summer 1982.
Rich, Adrienne. "Mr. Bones, He Lives," The Nation, vol. 198, May 25, 1964.
Sanders, Robert. "'Robofly' Solves Mystery of Insect Flight." .
Shapiro, Karl. Collected Poems. NY: Random House, 1978.
Stoutenberg, Adrien. Land of Superior Mirages: New and Selected Poems. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
Walter, Donald H. Building Your Own Airplane. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1995.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass,. NY: Dutton, 1971.
Williams, William Carlos. Selected Poems. NY: New Directions, 1969.
Wolke, Robert L. What Einstein Told His Barber. NY: Random House, 2000.
Wright, Wilbur and Orville. The Published Writings of Wilbur and Orville Wright, ed. Peter Jakab and Rick Young. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

Many thanks to Elizabeth Adcock for introducing me to the work of Adrien Stoutenberg, and to Brooks Haxton for reminding me of Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella" and its trace in Larkin's poem "Sad Steps."

About the Author
Marianne Boruch's recent books include Poems: New and Selected (Oberlin, 2004) and a collection of essays on poetry, In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity, 2005). She teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University.

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