Hanging from the Monkey Bars
In Fish Bones, Gillian Sze grabs you by the shifts in tense, keeps you bouncing about in time frames. And aptly it's the opening to a poem called "The Shaman's Dance" that offers the perfect locus upon which to pin this observation:
From my kitchen window, I seeIs the man pulling or has he pulled? One is tempted to offer to inflect the verb but there is another way to read the quasi-accidental: a man's pull flattened... so that the apostrophe "s" from the previous line and from the following line gets repeated. someone's, a man's, the tree's.
someone's left a stroller in the alleyway,
a man pull flattened cardboard boxes out of a dumpster,
the tree's bareness open to the sky's scalp.
I gather my cue from Sze's "I Still Think So" turning around and hanging from the syntactic monkey bars.
I Still Think SoDoesn't "a man's pull flattened cardboard boxes" look pretty? But it's wrong. The anaphora of the apostrophes is only a visual trick of reading too fast. An itch on sky-scalp.
I was nine
when I discovered
that I looked prettier
in photographs
when they were turned
upside down.
Temporal events collected in the simple act of seeing (the present holds - I see): someone left (present perfect), a man pull (present, a historical present?), bareness open (a present that hints at a continuous present?). And the anaphora is perhaps not so wrong as hidden. Tucked away. A future. Flattened.
And so for day 2083
26.08.2012