If I Could Give You a Line

“I assembled a me from them. I assembled a you. / We know all the lines. I’ve drawn the negative space around each one,” writes Carrie Oeding in “Ways to Keep Self-Portraiting,” a poem from her second collection, If I Could Give You a Line.

An outline can be a tool to distinguish self from other—a distinction sharpened with the help of negative space. This is just one of the ways in which lines govern one’s understanding of the world. Yet the purported linearity of life sometimes feels suspect.

While a groove may form through repeated motion, the clarity of purpose à la Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking is forced to swerve and dip in Oeding’s more cacophonous field. “What sound am I making?” the speaker asks. “It’s hard to think through my own orchestra. Would you please hold this note?” The shambles of a mind stuffed full of lines—from Cara Delevingne’s iconic arches to the results of a pregnancy stick—find expression across many of these one-page poems. Oeding writes: “When I’m a man, I give childbirth. // I Instagram my first word. I baptize balloons.” Her choice of startling, surreal moments captures a discontinuous experience of life.

Paradox becomes the everyday. The lack of a throughline accommodates the evanescence and beauty that is yet to be limned and framed, as suggested in “Why Describe a Moment When”:

It is the moment of summer. It is not. The peaches are yelling. It sounds
         like bright water.
                  My daughter runs through it in the backyard.
                           The season to depart as if we are staying right here.