PRISONERS
A distant beat comes
from the melting snow.
A delivery truck slowly
backing up. I have been
inside our apartment for centuries!
Trapped on a small blue-
and-green planet, spinning
through space, a prisoner.
But there is no jailor.
Just a cloud that appears
overhead in the shape
of a sword, severing
afternoon from evening.
-Matthew Rohrer
MATTHEW ROHRER is the author of Army of Giants (Wave Books, forthcoming 2024), The Sky Contains the Plans (Wave Books, 2020), The Others (Wave Books, 2017), which was the winner of the 2017 Believer Book Award, and many others. He has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and The Next Big Thing. His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at NYU.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Six): Matthew Rohrer
Though his work shows affinities with all the original poets of the New York school, Matthew Rohrer’s deft “Prisoners” combines the existential with the metaphysical in a way reminiscent of Charles Simic. I am thinking of the poem, “The Partial Explanation, “in which the speaker seems trapped forever in a café with only a smudged water glass for company, Simic, though often comic in his invocations of another world, courts its mystery—unlike, for the most part, the poets of the New York school, who have a cooler metaphysic, saving their wonder for the artistic process itself. The magic, in other words, is in the making. Arriving in the United States at sixteen, in New York somewhat later, Simic saw the city through a peculiar lens: the Slavic folktales that he tracked though the shelves of the New York public library and kept alive as saints for his poems. A devote of Latin American poetry and fiction, he winningly contrasts magic with realism, intensifying each.
Rohrer’s poem immerses us in a realm neither magical nor actual, but somehow caught in between.
The fascinating image that begins the poem, the “distant beat” that “comes from the melting snow,” places us in a world realistic but indefinite. “Comes from” leaves things open—refuses to call the sound anything so precise as “dripping”—and indeed, such a situation seems to produce an infinitesimal creaking and/or incipient drips and/or drips upon drips. It’s a complex articulation packed into “a beat”—that modest word that encloses drama and drums.
The delivery truck, in its slowness, the rhythm of its [unheard] warning beeps, prompts a sudden exclamation: “. . . I have been / inside our apartment for centuries!” The choice of “our” rather than “this” brings us into the poem as roommate, lover, and/or distant co-sufferer of an isolation that might be occasioned by COVID 19—but, if so, that’s merely circumstantial. The speaker’s focus abruptly goes long: “Trapped on a small blue- / and-green planet, spinning / through space, a prisoner.” Here Rohrer does what folklore does—he takes the cosmic literally. And why not? But the poem backs away from the magical with “But there is no jailor.”
A wonderful thing happens with “Just a cloud”—our foreboding sense of the metaphysical transfers to the sky:
Just a cloud that appears
overhead in the shape
of a sword . . .
Here, the natural points toward the mystical, the more powerfully for the poem’s restraint. That word “Just”!
In “of a sword, severing” is embedded the story of Eden and the cherub Jophiel waving a fiery blade that divides Adam and Eve from immortality and innocence. In place of timeless days and nights, they receive a world cut with sorrow.
In the astonishing understatement that follows, “severing / afternoon from evening,” we are set down again, rather roughly, in reality—a reality forever changed by meaning summoned and dismissed. But not entirely. That afternoon becomes evening is as big a mystery as ever. And because the mystery lives in us, no matter how confined, we are stunned each time by its appearance, and so remain child-like, perhaps hopeful—inhabiting a planet both impoverished and impossibly rich. -Angela Ball
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Author: Angela Ball
