Nothing More

In “Hitting Bottom,” Marilyn Nelson eulogizes Robert and Roberta Poston, the husband and child of African-American sculptor Augusta Savage (1892–1962). Robert, a journalist, perished at sea in 1924. Shortly thereafter, Savage gave birth to their daughter, who died just ten days later. Fittingly, Nelson sculpts her poem with care: it takes the form of an “X,” a shape freighted with potential meanings. As a Roman numeral, “X” might refer to those ten brief days. Does it also indicate the negation of death? Might it mark Savage, and her loved ones, as targets for tragedy? (“God / must hate Negroes,” Nelson writes, in Savage’s voice. “Why does God make / our luck so bad?”) The poem’s format mirrors the action Nelson describes: at the center of the “X,” where the letter’s diagonal lines meet, Robert Poston dies. Those lines then split apart, an echo of the young family’s separation.

 

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In “Might Have Been July, Might Have Been December,” Robert Wrigley compares the gymnastic maneuvers of two birds: "More oblique the eagle’s angle / than the osprey’s precipitous fall, / but rose up both and under them dangled / a trout, the point of it all.” Those first lines feature surprising reversals of word order (“rose up both” instead of “both rose up,” “under them dangled” instead of “dangled under them”)—echoes of the birds’ swift redirection in the air. Wrigley loads his poem with geometry terms, from “oblique” to “angle” to “diametrical” to “point,” which refers not just to the birds’ purpose but also to the vertex between their lines of descent. Afterward, each retreats to a “favored tree either side of the river.” Just as the birds cross to opposite banks, they strike during opposite times of year. The speaker sat under both, “one in December, / one in July, in diametrical seasonal airs.” Spatially as well as temporally, he perches at the “point of it all.”

 

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Julia Salem’s “Muzzle” is a ghazal, a verse form whose name rhymes with her title. Ghazals consist of couplets that end in refrains—in this case, “of snow.” Salem’s stanzas skate from one wintry image to the next: “feathers of snow” fall between trees; “cold tusks of snow” terrorize mice. Toward the end of the poem, around a “black spade pupil / Lurks an avalanche of snow,” a disastrous collapse waiting to happen. The penultimate line of a ghazal traditionally includes its writer’s name. In “Muzzle,” Salem nods toward this custom even as she forgoes it. “My name catches in your throat,” she writes, “congealed in its amnion of snow.” The “you” of the poem is muzzled; he never utters her name, so the poem doesn’t either. Similarly muzzled, Salem writes nothing more.

 

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Adrienne Su’s “Ginger” begins: “We’ll affirm its arrival / when it’s not in the titles / of recipes in which it figures / quietly, as moderate slivers.” The poem includes six such conditions—when the spicy plant is “always available,” “when everyone knows / not to bite the large pieces,” “when everyone preaches / the best means of peeling.” Su never once mentions the spicy plant’s name, hinting at a world where ginger is so common as to go without saying. The final condition is the most complex; while the others occupy just one stanza each, it sprawls over two. “When the nation remembers / how it treated as barbaric / the eaters of garlic / as they fled persecution // and sees its reflection / in black-and-white photos / of mobs against risotto.” “Eaters of garlic” refers to Italian immigrants, who were once derided as “garlic-eaters.” In associating ginger with garlic, now a staple of the American diet, Su reminds us how readily the foreign can become familiar.