To Be Made in the Image Of

“Ooze, oud,” urges Philip Metres in “Song for Refugees”—a poem whose resonant rhymes and rhythms suggest the music of the oud, a pear-shaped lute. He dedicates these stanzas to Mohamad Zatari, a Syrian oud soloist living in exile. The poem also echoes the work of another artist, Robert Frost: line by line, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” provides a sonic model for Metres’s mournful song.

Why allude to Frost’s wintry horseman in this particular context? Like a migrant in search of asylum, he pauses in a place that does not belong to him (“Whose woods these are I think I know”), and from which he must soon depart. The poem concludes: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.” In his own final stanza, Metres gestures toward more ominous journeys: the deadly sea voyages of contemporary refugees. “The oud’s a lovely ark that leaks / with tales and bromides we can’t keep, / and miles of ghosts before their sleep. And miles of ghosts beneath our sleep.” He compares the instrument to the Biblical ark, a vessel of rescue. But this ark leaks, dooming its passengers, who “sleep” well before their time.

 

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John Skoyles’s “Self-Help” uses the word “I” on eight occasions, yet in terms of both space and time, the speaker remains remote. “I was someone in the distance / who never got closer,” he writes. “I lived in the past, so the present / was my future.” In depersonalizing the personal pronoun, those first three words—“I was someone”—are especially telling.

What might explain Skoyles’s use of past tense throughout the poem? Is he describing conditions that no longer apply, or does his grammar indicate that he still “live[s] in the past”? Does his wording serve not just to communicate with his readers, but also to claim distance from us?

 

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In “The city has sex with everything,” Catherine Wagner describes a singular erotic relationship. “The air shaped like the inverse of Megan / accepts Megan as she moves,” and later, the woman’s “corpse, collapsing, / updates its inversion of the air,” which gains “all the energy and minerals // she pulled from her surrounds / to build her nails and bones and teeth.” Megan’s body, in death, remains a lively site of exchange with the world around her.

Having thus “inverted” our notions of life and death, of procreation and deterioration, Wagner applies this vision to the city itself. “The city caved under / when the zones rose and lapped around the pilings, / manged foundations green, / rotted the teeth out of the mouth of the city.” Now a giant corpse, the city’s “teeth” rot as Megan’s do. Such large-scale decay—a consequence, here, of climate change, and rising waters within flood zones—leads to another state of evolving disintegration, no less horrifying for its vitality: “mushrooms” will “grow in,” and “ruins” will “roam.”

 

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In Shane McCrae’s “The Hastily Assembled Angel Considers What It Means to Be Made in the Image Of,” humans are created “in the image not of God / Directly but of the angel     who the day God made / Human beings most resembled God.” To resemble God is no simple phenomenon. It’s “to resemble light    the way a bed / Resembles sunlight    when sunlight is spread // Across it   To resemble God is to / Remain the bed as the light slides away.” For McCrae, God’s physical being is amorphous, shifting, and evanescent.

But the humans in his poem develop a very different idea of the divine. Once God creates them, humans create gods in turn—and those gods resemble them, “with bodies and     glowering faces.” These first worshippers don’t know that their gods are, in fact, in the form of the aforementioned angel, their own prototype. Observing them, the angel forgets “his own body   bowing as they bow”: imitating the people who look like him, he bows down to a version of himself.