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"Different Trains": Reading Lewis Warsh by Barbara Henning Published in Talisman, Issue 18, Fall 1998. I love Lewis Warsh's writing because he writes beautiful, long sentences and he relentlessly interrogates the intimate secrets of women and men. His poetry is lyrical with detail and song turning as easily to philosophical reverie as to the clarity of every day conversation. In Avenue of Escape, he asks questions about the language of love, desire and experience. Just as we can't ever get close enough to what we most desire, elusive as it is, the answers to Lewis's questions slip away and the reader goes chasing after them, running fast and furious down the wrong street even though there is a sign in the sky that says: you are on the wrong road or you are riding the wrong train. Different Trains 1 The wind came off the page & embraced The solution to the problem is sitting there in a sealed envelope ("The letter arrives/ like an arrow/ crossing the margin/ of destiny, but/ no one has the nerve/ to break the seal" #8) like Poe's "Purloined Letter", so obvious but not available for reading, at least for the time being. When it arrives, whether opened or not, some destiny unfolds. The "words reverberate like/ recently sharpened pencils/ to address the air/ they float through" (#9). Little fragmented thoughts line up like a connected group of railroad cars, pushed or pulled by a locomotive--a series or row; something that is drawn along; an elongated part of a skirt or robe trailing behind on the ground; a course of reasoning, trailing along behind you. Words don't stick to things and the narrator reverts to memory and to the silly things people have said. He switches from one train of thought to the next, metonymically, that is, from "gnawing a bone" to "taboo about a bone" to "mother" to a "new lover" to "Amor equals action" to "pleasure" to "gift of speech" to "in this form alone". He tries to discover truth (or hears others trying to discover truth) and value by looking at the surface: tattoo taking the place of taboo. From the deep mythological roots of the gorgon and the mother, we are left with a pragmatic transformation of sexual power: "Sex, not work: but/ you're fired, we've hired/ a new lover". This poetic sequence is a lament of the jilted lover or the lament of the lover whose object keeps switching. He isn't being replaced. He is a token, yet acting and the action is love, but love on the surface only. He doesn't get the bone, only the tattoo or the twitching skirt, the dangling earring. The narrator travels and yet he's directionless and "Every place is the same". The mind is floating. "A dot filling a hole/ that didn't exist before you came. They reserve a place for you & you fill it" (#11). Just one person after another, one word after another, one story after another. Is love a train of thought or different trains of thought, intersecting and reflecting each other? And the trains of thought take you far away from yourself, a diversion, a plane out of here. Ultimately they don't work: "I get off the plane & no one's there." With only one, love seems impossible. And how can one tell the truth, pulled here and there by one's desire, language and understanding. How can one be an ethical lover when one is a dot filling a hole? Some people are so lonely or so sexy or so complicated that they crave more than one dot at a time. All these trains of thought want to transcend the monotonous thinking body and the pleasure of anonymous fucking and breaking taboos--two at a time. When Lewis reads his poetry out loud, there is an underlying monotone and at the same time a series of speaking voices and each one looks for an escape and yet is enclosed in a narrative structure that laments the impossibility of ethical love, ethical desire, ethical pleasure. Quickly he shifts to the advice one gives a child. He dedicates #14 to Sophia, his younger daughter, a vibrant, talkative and dramatic young woman. I can see her now as a little girl reaching over to tie her shoe. And in the midst of all the plans and details, "a dead man's rattle". Some rules help ("Or so I told you/ as you were starting/ out: stay calm/ cross at the corners// in perfect visibility") and we hope our children remember that learning how to deal with traffic can be a metaphor to study throughout life: know where you are where you are going and how you will get there, even though there is a hopeless rattle over your left shoulder, even though some days you feel like a photograph on a table. A photograph of myself & my children on A lover becomes a "person". The inner life of another becomes "a shock of disbelief on her face," the face and the shock equal to "a cup of tea". We are acting in a television sit com. The script has already been written. We are spectators of our own lives, dots in the middle of holes, erased and rewritten. "Dominates", "crash of dominos", and "the domino effect". Silence submits to words in #17, words that exist only to be memorized, and then there is a commercial and time for lunch before everything collapses under the weight. Crash. Is it a kiss or a hang man's noose? Can we transform our own relationship to pleasure and redefine it so that it can also hold disaster and vacancy in its core? The writing of the poem becomes a way out of the problem: "The lines of the page were like the rungs of a ladder/ Leading to heaven, & I was the medium/ Through which they flowed back to earth" (#17). In his story "Secret", Lewis writes: "I tell people my
secrets in the hope that they'll tell me theirs. People think I'm an attentive
listener but the only reason I talk to them is to see what they say in
my writing." Beware of the ear of the transcribing poet. Or perhaps
this, too, is a secret someone told Lewis. In #19, he enumerates the many
sacrifices and lame attempts to justify the pains of love, perhaps including
your secret: separating physical pleasure from loyalty and affection;
accepting the middle ground; becoming a slave to one's lover; writing
failure and disaster into the narrative before one even reaches a climax.
And then the narrator makes a quick turn and says, "but I'd be/ lying
to myself if I thought we could last forever,/ that one night, as we lay
in bed with the blankets/ on the floor, hair matted to the silk pillowcase,/
the cops aren't going to arrive with their clubs/ & accoutrements
& cart us away in the back/ of their tiny trucks" (#18). Such
a strange and unexpected fear of the police. At first, I suspected the
narrator of lying to himself by 20 (Coda) I know that somewhere it's written Apparent and available since ancient times and yet the name on the line is always interchangeable, always unreadable. Our thinking and our love seem muddled beyond recognition. Is it possible to love each other without causing immeasurable suffering? Lewis's ladder takes us to the clouds. Look up and away for another avenue where the clouds and the wind and we are the same. I loved reading this poem over and over again, riding in each car, embraced and quickly abandoned by the words of an author who I imagine looks like my friend, Lewis. Bird-like with his hair rumpled, he sits in the distance at the foot of a tree, reading and the train speeds by.
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