Ten couplets make up Telling the Story by Susan V. Meyers. Ten long thin stanzas like the fingers on my hands, her hands, like the fingers that “eventually learn” in her poem. Two lines per stanza like the two fingers with which you check your pulse. The equivalence of structure to body does not remain consistent though the structure does.
Consistency is pressing too hard, too much ambition that “defeats us”, doesn’t let the body change like the burning cinders (hard things the fire leaves), stars, and red leaves the poem’s speaker sometimes feels. This lyric list is broken into
leaves flushing red, or a bone like an arrow—
the dead generations’—cupped cold in my hand like some certain arc.
with dashes as the arrow-bones’ line of flight: a part of the body becomes a projectile, moves through the generations of the dead then back to be cupped in a hand, an arc, but the hand is an arc or the object at rest can be an arc too in the indeterminate grammar of the line.
How can a mind in a body shifting so know “Is this the story I should be telling?” This is an adolescent girl speaking, her fingers digging into her neck, trying to find the one thing that’s supposed to stay steady, until she becomes dizzy. (One’s heart rate may change throughout the menstrual cycle.) This is also an older woman looking back, who still doesn’t know everything but realizes
…perhaps it’s enough that this story got started,
that fingers eventually learn:If you want to find rhythm, test gently;
our blood pulses close at the skin.
The body learns as the body shifts, not the brain or the disembodied line alone. And only perhaps: those who change in a changing world must temper their wisdom with uncertainty, or it is not very wise.
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Tags: body, Emprise Review, Susan V. Meyers
