New Confusion
after Adam Clay
This morning I experienced optimism
reading assertive sentences & powerful
verbs. An hour later in the silence
of the refrigerator humming I leaned
to pick up a crumb, remembered
the same reach last week. Alone & ill
is being with illness as company. According
to the CDC, you should seek
emergency medical help for COVID-19
if you experience new confusion. I’ll
have to continue raking leaves in a gale,
playing a favorite record with scratches,
always wanting to check the mail for something
like love to appear inside its envelope
& its walls. I know what I know
of language doesn’t matter unless I share
it with others, what I need of words:
their outward lean. Cars roll past
on the street of rainwater, disappear
into the roar of cars and trucks.
There’s never an outside until I am well
enough, but then I’ll see the tree that turns
fine & brittle in winter, full of asterisks.
-Brooke Harries
first published in Denver Quarterly
Brooke Harries‘ work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, North American Review, Salamander, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She was awarded the Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Prize, the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Dissertation & Thesis Fellowship, and the UC Irvine Graduate Award for Excellence in Poetry. Currently, she teaches English at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana.
The New York School Diaspora (New Series) Part Six: Brooke Harries
The title of Brooke Harries’ enlivening poem is Frank O’Hara-like in that it couples words with opposing qualities, as in “Meditations in an Emergency.” It signals a readjustment of relations between contexts. An “after” poem is a collaboration with a silent partner that remakes an existing work—makes free with it. Another readjustment.
The poem’s movement between an apparent classroom and a refrigerator (its noise vanished into whiteness) recalls a back-and-forth in O’Hara between wide and narrow contexts: for example, in “The Day Lady Died,” a busy shopping street and a private feeling of “quandariness.” Though this alternation directs our lives, it is seldom dramatized. There is something brilliantly out-of-scale in experiencing déjà vu in relation to retrieving a crumb: “remembered / the same reach last week.”
The poem begins with the “optimism” of “reading assertive sentences & powerful
verbs.” Here it reminds us teaching’s importance:
I know what I know
of language doesn’t matter unless I share
it with others: what I need of words:
their outward lean
Our solitary speaker needs the connection words provide: as communication and as shared task, a tendency simply and eloquently expressed as “their outward lean.”
The description of the hoped-for letter is also both unassuming and global: “wanting to check the mail for something / like love to appear inside its envelope /& its walls.” The relationship with language so skillfully limned here might remind us of Emily Dickinson and her “letter to the world,” expansiveness born of narrow fascicles.
What better image of teaching than “raking leaves in a gale”? And what a fine description Harries gives us of being a sidelined flaneuse, gazing at the modest but exact “street of rainwater” with its cars disappearing not into distance but into noise: “the roar of cars and trucks,” the repetition of “cars” creating an oddly exact “new confusion.” Perhaps, we think, the world is made of sound, of expression cutting across silence.
What follows replicates the strangeness of illness: the feeling of the world having evanesced: “There’s never an outside until I’m well / enough.” This gets at the double feeling of being left inside while others walk about freely: everything real is happening without me; because it’s without me, it’s not real.
The speaker’s aloneness recalls that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” in which the poet, his wife having accidently spilled boiled milk on his foot, is perforce left behind by William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Charles Lamb, who have departed on a hike. The poem can be seen as Coleridge’s way of following along, enjoying their enjoyment—especially Lamb’s: “for thou hast pined / And hunger'd after Nature, many a year, / In the great City pent.” This generously vicarious joy acquires a bird as vehicle:
. . . when the last rook
Beat its straight path along the dusky air
Homewards, I blest it! deeming its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had cross'd the mighty Orb's dilated glory,
While thou stood'st gazing
The vehicle of transport in Brooke Harries’ wryly exultant poem is an ordinary tree, visually joined to printing. After “turns,” we expect leaves but get the entire tree: “but then I’ll see the tree that turns / fine & brittle in winter, full of asterisks,” a nexus of images at once surprising and recognizable, punctuation that refers elsewhere. “New Confusion” gives us just that and something more: the non-vicarious pleasure of perception that arrests and holds. — Angela Ball