Amphibrach Dance
Remember, first falling, and falling, from lofty, from distant, from dizzy cliff's slim ledge, yes falling, through clear, not blue-burned air, yet falling, still falling to soft sand, to hard sea, to longing for longing, and much less: the broken, the thunky, the dancing we each did, the heels down, then toes up, then heels down, the rocking, the forward and, yes, back— its measure so awkward, the sad dance we each did, remember, remember? from The Cradle Place (Mariner Books, 2004)
Before I begin, if you are unfamiliar, an amphibrach is a kind of metrical foot that follows the pattern unstressed-stressed-unstressed. Think of limericks. Think of, as Wikipedia — the people’s encyclopedia — will tell you, Leonard Cohen’s song, “Famous Blue Raincoat,” and how it begins:
It's four in the morning, the end of December
Each one of those lines: an amphibrach. You hear the stress in the four, the morn, the end, the middle cem of December.
I like that December is an amphibrach. I like that remember is, too. I think of the amphibrach like a heartbeat with an added diminishment at the end. If a heartbeat is like a hand knocking on the door of the soul, first lightly, then a little louder, then an amphibrach is one last reminder (that word, reminder: an amphibrach in its own right) after that louder knock: ba-bum-ba.
Leave it to Thomas Lux (who I wrote about years ago; at this point, I imagine myself returning, often enough, to those I’ve returned to before) to title a poem like this, and to structure a poem entirely out of such a heartbeat-adjacent unit of metrical measurement. And leave it to Thomas Lux to make something gorgeous out of it all. Read this poem aloud, and pay careful attention to the beauty these moments make in your mouth:
yet falling, still falling
to longing for longing
the forward and, yes, back—
the sad dance we each did, remember, remember?
This is a poem in one of its truest forms. There is a sing-song-y quality to the amphibrach that Lux uses to tilt and lilt feeling out of. The forward and, yes, back. When you say that line aloud, you can feel the rhythm pull and move you. It’s wave-like; it feels, too, like a conductor’s arms moving through the air. And the result of such an action — that hand-waving, that movement, that music — is meaning made out of song. It is slant and joy and strangeness and sorrow, all rolled up into one rollicking, living thing. When you read it aloud, you sing life into your life.
And that is what I want to write about today, if I may. I want to write about the joy of reading. The pure thrill of it. I want to write about returning to a poet I love in order to re-feel that same love of what it means to sing life into my life.
Thomas Lux is one of those poets I return to when I need to feel such a thing. In “Beneath the Apple Branches Bent Dumbly,” he writes:
What is the same? Only the incomparable chins of horses, only a desire to place the mural of a pond horizontal as it belongs, only the long haul in the linear world, ongoing.
Whew! The incomparable chins / of horses! The long haul in the linear world! The ongoing! Lux’s poems remind me of Paul Guest’s and Matthew Olzmann’s and Patrick Rosal’s and Heather Christle’s — these jarring, often joyful things that take me out of the wrench-turned rut in which I have placed myself.
In “1987,” Paul Guest writes:
My soul: whatever it sings it is singing.
Perfect, right? Beautiful? One of those lines you should box into a buried chest to remind whoever comes next what it must’ve meant to be human. I don’t know what other lines you need.
And here, smack in the middle of a Matthew Olzmann poem, are these lines:
On Earth, when my wife is sleeping, I like to look out at the sky. I like to watch TV shows about supernovas, and contemplate things that are endless like the heavens and, maybe, love. I can drink coffee and eat apples whenever I want. Things grow everywhere, and so much is possible, but on the news tonight: a debate about who can love each other forever and who cannot.
I love a poem like this, one that says simply and beautifully and with what feels like such an authentic voice, what might be possible, and what resists that possibility. I love a poem that wonders.
And then there’s this declaration at the heart of Patrick Rosal’s “You Cannot Go to the God You Love with Your Two Legs”:
If you’ve kissed bricks in secret or fallen asleep where there was no bed or spent time lighting a fire, then you know the beginning of love and maybe you know the end of it too
And finally, there’s a Heather Christle poem titled “Fleurrrrs.” In it, she writes:
I will call my mood ranunculus A ranunculus is a beautiful flower with a very ugly name I love it I do not love my mood
That combination of the strange beauty of fact with the strange beauty of human life, awareness, and observation — it is that combination that often rocks me back into the world.
There’s a reason why I’m finding poems I’ve loved by poets I’ve loved. It’s because sometimes I feel a little in the weeds of the world, unable to wonder. And I think that’s what I want to write about today, with Lux’s poem above as a stand-in, Lux’s dancing poem, Lux’s singing poem, Lux’s poem that reminds me of what a poem can come out of and speak to, can be borne from and sing towards. I am thinking of all of this because I am not really in the mood for poetry lately, because I haven’t written a poem in a long time, and because I am tired. I am thinking of all of this because sometimes I turn to a poem because I am aware of what a poem can offer me. And I want to write about that offering, if I may.
That offering — that thing that a poem can give, feel, twist, move, shine, darken, dampen, rhyme, twirl, love, dance, carry, turn, speckle, rage, kiss, touch, and simmer — is an offering of delight, isn’t it? It is delight, I think, that is what I most often feel — even in some encounter of sorrow — when I read a poem I love. It is the delight of song and dance, of surprise. When I am moved to sadness, there is delight in the movement. Delight in the unexpected, the whoosh of feeling something inside me quite literally move — breath caught, stomach dropped. There is delight, I am trying to say, even in the sad dance a poem can portray.
What is difficult, I find, is that, when you are in the weeds of the world — as I am now, trying to keep my head above water while making final plans for curriculum, classes, all sorts of things — you have to be intentional about seeking out such delight. Strange thing, this is. Kind of annoying, if I am being honest. But there is a difference between the delight that comes unsurprisingly and the delight that surprises. The former can be lovely, but the world manufactures such things and sends them your way even without your permission. The latter is always lovely, but you often have to seek such delight. It is nestled in books or in knowing the names of plants. It is in the looking, and sometimes the looking can be hard.
And what is also difficult is that poetry lives — especially in this society — in a position of precarity. It is free to write but hard to sustain. And poetry is, often, the work of surprise and delight. Think of how a poem like today’s can play with a metrical structure, over and over again, and make a dance out of it. A song. The play of that — the real play — is a kind of labor. It requires space and time; it requires the opportunity to allow whatever it is you need in order to create into your life. When you are thick with the sometimes mind-numbing and unimaginative labor of life that feels unsustainable rather than sustaining, it is hard to find that space for allowance — the allowance to read the work that surprises or create the work that surprises. What happens then? I think delight becomes harder to find. I think that’s a sad and too often truth of this world.
And so, when I am in a position such as this, when I feel already lost to poetry and in the thick of less delighting labor, I have to remind myself to make the space for delight. Not because that is what we all must do — make space, space that might feel impossible to make for ourselves. But because it is the only way to bring myself back to a world of delight.
I think of this final repetition of Lux’s as a callback, an echo from the past to remind me of joy:
remember, remember?
To begin and end the poem with these words repeated is to remind the reader of all that came before — not just what came before the ending of the poem, the sad dance, and the music, and the long, twirling, back-and-forth sentence of life, but also what came before the writing of it. Remember, Lux seems to be saying, all that life can be, if we allow it to be.
When I am out of touch with language and swallowed up in the rudimentary, bureaucratic, unimaginative quality of language that the world so often feeds us, I need that reminder to remember. It is a valuable reminder. It is powerful. It is good. It is why I keep poetry in my life, even and especially when I feel far from it.
Because it is poetry that taught me to treat observation like joy, to make stories and song out of what I pay attention to. Like the wolf-sized dog I saw this morning, the one sauntering through the bookstore. Like the kestrel I saw again on my fire escape, near two years after I saw it last. Like the steam of a slice of pizza as I balance it on a paper plate in my hand. Like watching students see their favorite teachers after a summer of not seeing them. Like glimpsing the woman who moved in to the building I can see from my window, and how she goes to smoke a cigarette on her balcony, and sometimes looks at her phone and smiles. Like the sky last night, burnt orange and purple, streaking across the sky, in a kind of motion that was also a kind of stillness. There is a kind of joy in all of that, even if it sometimes makes me sad. There can be a joy in sorrow, I think, when it is prompted by surprise. The joy is not in the sorrow, but in the feeling. It’s in the reminder — amphibrach of a word — that the world is singing, and that the soul is recognizing such singing as song.
A long time ago, when I was in a space such as this, I wrote a poem that began with the following lines:
I have not written a single poem in months. Last night, playing the guitar, I thought I happened upon a poem, but it was just the F#, & it was out of place. I put the guitar away. & sometimes I count the pigeons outside my window, & wait, hoping, for a hawk – something to break the space of the ordinary. But it hasn’t come yet. I’ve had dreams: I’ve dreamed myself a rock in water. I’ve dreamed myself glass soft enough to form. But always when I wake I am myself. & sometimes I wonder, & think the wondering is enough.
Reading them back to myself, I am reminded that the out-of-place note, the ordinary pigeons, the dreams — such things are places of the imaginary, places where the world as it is nestled itself alongside the world as I thought it had to be, that stiff, hard-nosed place that is unsurprising and often lacking in joy. And then I remember — amphibrach word that it is — that I wrote a poem out of it all. It’s possible, I am trying to say. It’s possible to find delight.
A Note:
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"... The joy is not in the sorrow, but in the feeling. It’s in the reminder — amphibrach of a word — that the world is singing, and that the soul is recognizing such singing as song ..."
Thank you so much for the introduction to the word "amphibrach."
Your prose reads like poetry.
I enjoy your posts. They remind me that I enjoy learning and thinking and feeling.