Two Odes and a Throw to Neruda 

 

Who can say they haven’t been split in two, sucked dry, had their smile peeled? How does one attempt to heal from a leaving? Thank God for the wet socks of our own making. 

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“Ode to the Mango” is about manners—the ways we are taught to do things or how to realize what manner of process is working on us—from cutting fruit, to dropping bombs, to writing poems. There’s the juxtaposition of borders, competing identities—the slickness of living in between, what seems permitted or outlawed arbitrarily by fathers and fatherlands. The free verse stanzas are, perhaps, a reach for freedom, though each reach of a line, of course, breaks. First the speaker learns a way to eat a mango from his father—a careful knife-skinning technique, the way the father cut people from his life. Later, in a warzone, the speaker’s taught a second way to cut a mango that “gets results” too. But, “no matter the method,” to get what you want is going to be mess, a peeling of skin. Toward the end, the speaker, a teacher of young poets, sees, even in art, how the possessive heart yearns to colonize and consume images. The mango teaches. 

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“Attempts to Answer” is an apprompted poem, a poem that declares its conversation with another text. In apprompted poems, what you have to question how much is borrowed—how much mirroring to the text pulled into conversation? The cleverness of this poem lies in its reward if you do the assigned reading of Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions, a work composed of proverby, unanswerable stanzas, which take their energy from being non-sequiturs, reminding readers of the poetry of childhood—of its deep, ridiculous questions about the color of leaves and sky, the slyness of animals. Like Neruda’s poem, “Attempts to Answer” is posed in numbered sections, section 2 echoing the non-sequiturs and subject matter of Neruda’s poem. What “Attempts to Answer” reveals in the final two sections is that the speaker is frightened by loneliness, having been left by a woman—a former leader in the relationship, perhaps, a call-back to the female sheep in section 1 for whom “to stay is no option.” Section 4 reaches for a brother, only to find “it didn’t take” and returns full circle to the question of what name to give to the sadness of a lonely herding animal. 

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“Ode to the Suddenly Wet Sock” is an odyssey that time-tunnels through childhood all the way back through an “apeself” to a “primordial” cry in a swamp. The sock begins a villain but ends a subversive savior—a sensorial eruption that can distract the speaker from “the news” that “threatens / to swallow me whole.” The wet sock, in a twist, keeps the speaker going. The Maslow’s Hierarchy need to be dry triumphs over the less tangible. The poem’s form, too, is straightforward. Perhaps the most cryptic moment is the antepenultimate line: “I am no Peter Pan.” What would it mean to be Peter Pan—flying from worldly problems? Never-never having to foot earth? It’s an evocative moment to slow on, to think back to the movements of adolescence—to take the blame and clean up the messes you can, the sad-sock self that you can change.

 

Read these to find sense in fission, in loneliness, to stretch borders, repeal. The odes tell how to be wary and grateful in troubled times, vigilant to metaphor. Answering Neruda lets us stew in parables, push the porous boundaries between poems, which, like wet socks, can suddenly be sieves for the soul.