Close Reading

Robert Allen

July 25, 2021

The first line is curved like the bow of a ship.

  The second line is severed in two places.

   The third line contains a word you do not know.

    You stop to look it up, believing it critical

     to your understanding of the entire poem.

     The fourth line describes something dangerous

    you did when you were twelve, sending you back

   to a childhood memory, some boys you once knew,

  before you shake yourself and return to the page.

 The fifth line is curved like a woman’s hip.

  The sixth line has some words crossed out,

   making you overestimate the line length.

    The seventh, eighth, and ninth lines are missing

     completely, as if this were an ancient manuscript

     whose pages had begun to decay and disappear.

    The tenth line has an image which makes you gasp.

   You begin to read quickly to see what happens,

  losing track of the line where you are in the poem.

 The next line is curved like the edge of a violin,

  with so sharp a turn the melody of the poem

   finds an ache in your heart, which slows you down,

    almost compels you to stop, then does not.

     The line after that has another startling phrase,

     which does make you stop and admire the poet’s genius.

    The next line contains the barest hint of a suggestion.

   The line after that is heavy with symbolism.

  The next line hits like rain on a tin roof.

 The line after that is curved like your lover’s lips.

  You begin to harbor secrets: the touch of her skin,

   smell of her hair, sound of her naked voice

    on the phone. You brood on the feel of the poem

     in your mouth, how its words float in the cold, wet air

     and drop down to earth as if after a long voyage.

    The next line, which by a ghost editor’s quick

   and inexplicable count is the sixty-seventh line

  of the poem, is simply radiant, being that point

 in any good poem where a marvelous resolution

  is achieved. You may not understand, yet,

   how that resolution works but you know it is there.

    You begin to look back over the poem,

     rereading some lines and noticing, now, certain

     images and correspondences you missed

    the first time through. You see the relationship

   between a word in the first line and other words

  in the tenth and nineteenth lines. The whole fabric

 of the poem acquires a unity, a harmony of omen.

  You wish you could write a poem like this.

   You wish, at least, that you could be more aware

    of the gifts you have as a poet and be able

     to employ them with skill while composing.

     You wish out of daft artistic desperation

    you could enter into a zone of poem-making,

   the way Magic or Larry or Michael could create

  with a round orange ball, where your words

 would live on the curve of a page and your readership

  could feel an ocean breeze coming off the gulf,

   hear the rattle of leaves in an alder grove

    you walked once in Scotland looking for cairns,

     taste your mother’s warm caramel fudge fresh

     from the stove in her Formica-countered kitchen

    during the middle years of the twentieth century.

   If words do not fail, whether you sit at a desk

  with slim pen in hand or fat fingers to keyboard,

 you wish your snaking curve of images and quips

could flow like a serenade, seduce, and set sail.

Robert Allen is retired and lives with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and five cats. He has poems in di-vêrsé-city, Voices de la Luna, the Texas Poetry Calendar, the San Antonio Express-News, The Ocotillo Review, and Poetry on the Move. He now co-facilitates Gemini Ink’s Open Writer’s Lab.