Poetic Turns

The newest poem from Linebreak is a great example of poetic turns. Here is the poem:

Against Aristophanes

by Jacques Rancourt

                                                  No e-mails can reach you.
                                                  No texts. Here, a smokestack

                                                  chokes up soot intermittently.
                                                  Cloud-makers, I once called them,

                                    (5)         and what a world if that were true.
                                                  At the window I tap from

                                                  the interior and wait for the ghost
                                                  to write back. Only the willow,

                                                  starved for water, responds
                                    (10)       by clicking a beaded branch

                                                  against the glass. At one end
                                                  of a parking lot, a Target bag

                                                  skims the pavement,
                                                  drifts before a thing whose stillness

                                    (15)        I took to be a truck at rest,
                                                  moonlight on chrome,

                                                  its driver asleep across the seats.
                                                  How his mother, if she lives,

                                                  must worry. I wake and wait
                                    (20)       for you to call at this lavender hour.

                                                  Nothing strange inside
                                                  your heartbeat, irregular as it was,

                                                  nothing but your blood's drum,
                                                  your mysterious body

                                     (25)      more mysterious now,
                                                  more foreign for being

                                                  outside of me. I thought
                                                  we were made of water,

                                                  one soul split into two,
                                     (30)      but we are made of canyon,

                                                  a sky unpolluted by light
                                                  and thus filled with light,

                                                  a moon so full
                                                  if reveals the desert to be

                                      (35)     in motion: a coyote stalking
                                                  a trickle of water,

                                                  a wren skipping nail to nail
                                                  on the arm of a cactus.

I see two distinct turns in this poem. The beginning of the poem has these wonderful images, all of them charged with some imaginal energy. I like the image of the smokestack smoking away. The narrator taps against the glass, watching a Target bag drifting through the parking lot like some wrath--"At one end / of a parking lot, a Target bag / skims the pavement, / drifts before a thing whose stillness /  I took to be a truck at rest, / moonlight on chrome," All very beautiful! The poem is focused on describing all of these images, a very image heavy poem. And then it turns in line 19-- "I wake and wait / for you to call at this lavender hour." Now we are inside the narrators head again and he (I'm assuming it is a male) is dreaming of "your mysterious body" (which I am assuming is a girl).

But it doesn't stop there. In his contemplation he continues to look inward. To examine this relationship and how it effects him and his sense of self. On this inward journey, the narrator turns the poem again in line 27--"I thought / we were made of water, / one soul split into two, / but we are made of canyon," Now we turn into a metaphor. These two people, man and woman, are "made of canyon." They cannot be further from each other; they are different.

Some wonderful final images as well.

• "a coyote stalking / a trickle of water, / a wren skipping nail to nail / on the arm of a cactus."