The Long O which starts Ohio

What does an address mean? Tell me 241 Melrose Ave and I can witness a great part of my childhood. There are the streets of still industrial Toledo, Ohio. It could write for hours. In the same way these poems work by the evocation of sphericities: the circularity of the body leaving and the mind returning to a gone place. “Grafting” with its metaphor of skin, with its numerous addresses that are much more than a set of numbers and names—they are a kind of code for unlocking memory. From Ohio to California the codes are entered and the memories—the stories—come spilling out, “some beautiful/and sad stories from the scar in which he will not help/not the body/ at least.”

There address are also time signatures. They mark a time in the poet’s life, and as in much they make a rhythm of long lined epiphanies. Here are arrivals and departures. Here is the voice of the diaspora. There is always the other place beneath the place. There are the leavings and there is “A Yellow Girl” learning the nomenclature of the playground and all its clashes. The reality of race in the Midwest. The meanness of it all one must manage, the small voice before it rises.

I love a good triptych and these poems are very much a triptych. In the first we have the addresses and the place. The second zeros in one childhood portraiture, and the last one takes us away from “half my life in the cold neighborhood of Akron” to the ocean and New England, to a place of now and memory’s ubiquities—how they follow us, how they try to name us but we have taken on so many names onto the body. Grafts of names owned and discarded. Why do the stories stop? When will one find them again? Where must one float is on a body of water. A body on a body of water.

And there is food and aromas, and there is longing for another. There are funerals and passing time. So many goodbyes in so few pages. And despite there being no ocean in the center of Ohio to swim across, no lesson in the lessening. How sometimes the long O at the start of Ohio sure feels like one.