Ann Kjellberg, founding editor of Little Star, an annual journal of poetry and prose, and Little Star Weekly, its mobile app version, will be offering a poem every Sunday this spring. This is her sixth post.
Though Geoffrey O’Brien’s criticism is very richly furnished and densely populated—with genres, artists, languages, milieux, characters high and low—his poetry is spare almost to the point of invisibility. Indeed, the boundary between being there and not being there is very often his theme, as in “Another One for Joel”: “This is not the poem, / this is just the place / where the poem disappears.”
In “The Chimes,” the intervals between the chiming of bells demarcate time and isolate its worldly cargo. Each chime, announced by a numbered stanza, creates a cross-section of time that the poem scrutinizes for evidence of being: “The nature of time // Is to dissolve / Into reverberations // The character of dusk / Is to proclaim them.” O’Brien’s characteristically short lines are another manifestation of this inquiry: the poem keeps returning to the point of origin ( “2 / I am once again / where I never was before”). They look from a narrow ledge into an expanse of emptiness.
This scrutiny creates a synesthesia in which the evidence of different senses is interchangeable, tested for its truthfulness: The chimes “sound like shivers of light”; “like the sound of glass.” A sky “seen from inside itself” reveals “blue glow // Flame color / Not seen but heard / Not heard but // Apart from.” These isolations invoke Zeno’s problem: how do the items of presence that we perceive coalesce into the continuous world we know? (“Unending coincidence / Of separations // A walk / Through frosty air”). The language of description is both an alternative in a range of presences and an estranging mechanism itself.
The resulting hypnotic repetitions transport the reader into a zone where sensation is thought and feeling is inquiry. They register a mournful remoteness from experience within their tender regard for it. The “unidentifiable archways” past which the poem returns home in the last stanza summon the possibilities of art—De Chirico? Piranesi?—without engaging them. But that homeward journey, these crystalline poems’ yearning extension toward the world we know and feel, is their heartbeat.
Read twelve more new poems by Geoffrey O’Brien in Little Star #5 (2014). He is the author of, most recently, a book of poems, Early Autumn, and Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film 2002–2012.
The Chimes
1
The nature of time
Is to dissolve
Into reverberations
The character of dusk
Is to proclaim them
2
I am once again
Where I never was before
In a town unknown to me
Even when I lived here
3
They sound like
Shivers of light
Clashing
Like the sound of glass
As it shatters
Into shadows of shadows
4
They sound like
The inmost lock
Springing
The subtlest catch
Coming loose
5
Or a bundle of keys
Dropped on a metallic sky
6
Where we are walking
Is always somewhere else
Already gone
7
Crosscut saw
Sliding sideways through time
8
In the same place
And the same hour
A different place
And a different hour
Unending coincidence
Of separations
A walk
Through frosty air
9
Disconnected sky
Seen from inside itself
10
In which is blue glow
Flame color
Not seen but heard
Not heard but
Apart from
11
Jars the street
Or as when
Pressing one surface on another
The registration is off
12
The body finds a way
To the contours
Of what was ditched
And in the wrong year
Walks home
Past unidentifiable archways
—Geoffrey O’Brien