The construction of this poem, consisting of so many dependent clauses revealing previous events and perceptions after the poet commences to speak of his walk, makes me think of someone attempting to conduct a tour of a neighborhood while walking backwards, spicing up his odd stride with a monologue that is unfocused at best.
Song of the Unseen Bird / HL Spelman
To walk so long with her in so much quiet
Then hear that unseen bird, whose name
I don’t know, wouldn’t know where to find,
Singing somewhere among the leaf sheen,
Was to realize why, when his beloved hero-killer
Resolves at last to die, Homer gives us
Not the laments the sea nymphs wail
But the nonsense song of their limpid names
He makes up: Limnoreia and Doto and Proto
And sometimes there are no words
And Kallianassa and Kymodoke and Maera
And sometimes no words could be sad enough.
Ashwing, Seedquit, Spotted Larmer:
Tee-way tee-wee tee-wooo you sang to us.
The walking companions , he hopes, continue to be interested in the bits and pieces of facts and mythical factoids even as he falls backwards, tripping over a rake, a tree root upending a chuck of sidewalk, a rake left by a homeowner gone to the backyard to fetch a basket for the leaves he's raked up. This poem stumbles greatly and does easily blend the informative, the mythic and the incidental and the mythic, say literary, into the sort of casual, seamless streamlined elegance we praise Billy Collins or, even better, Thomas Lux. There are too many grace notes for this poet to include, I think.
This is less about what the poet found out during a walk or what they saw that they hadn't seen before than it is about the poet's education; this is a world where everything he sees reminds him of something he's read , a tendency that seems like a condition rather than a bad habit. This poem is another bulging, overstuffed suitcase of intelligent chit chat, not a matching sock in the lot.
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Verbal Remedy AKA Denise
John Hughes
Dorinda D.
Paul Levinson
Joan Walsh
Karen Templer
Salon.com
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