Day for Night

In the dream I may have dreamt, I'm looking out the window of my childhood house. Inside the house it is night, but outside it is day. I'm watching a huge bristly opossum groping around the leaf-strewn yard. The opossum is lost in the light and is sniffing each nook and crevice for a dark place of escape.

A dented pick-up truck pulls up and two tall gangly men get out. They are carrying a cage and a stick noose. They suddenly spot the opossum and run towards it, as it begins trying to wedge itself into an abandoned gofer hole. "Hey, what you going to do with that opossum?" I say. One of the men looks up and says, "We're going to take him to the Wildlife Refuge Station," and then the other fellow says, "We gettin' us some hound dog training bait!" I rush out the door, scoop up the struggling opossum, and run back into the house. It's still dark inside, but because I'm holding the opossum, I can see just fine. I hurry through the house trying to lock all the doors, but the handles keep snapping off in my hand.

I set the opossum up in an over-stuffed armchair and turn on the TV for him -- he seems calmer now and begins to watch an aerobics workout on ESPN. I tell him we have to keep the volume off so the rednecks won't find us. Then I peek through the venetian blinds -- the men are still looking through the yard for something wild to stick in their cage. I call several friends and tell them this incredible story about how I fought off a truck-load of rednecks with my bare hands and how I rescued a mother opossum and her three babies. With each phone call the story gets more detailed and melodramatic. Everyone loves the story. When I've finished calling the last of my friends I look around and the opossum is gone.

The Critic's Response

summer heat
    slowing my step
        at the wax museum

    Upon careful study of the poem's first line, it would appear that it is indeed warm outside, but when viewed on a deeper psychological level, we see the poet may well mean to imply an internal rise of temperature, indicative of either subdued passion or a lingering fever held over from some recent infirmity. The brilliant juxtaposition of "heat" and "summer" can only lead one to the conclusion that the poem was set in the Western Hemisphere, unless of course the poet was indeed in Africa or some other such country, and under the delusion of the aforementioned illness -- in which case we would have to assume the equatorial influences of winter would, despite the possibilities of fever, give the line an entirely different set of rules and external stimuli to act upon.

    Perhaps my favorite of the lines, "slowing my step" brings us into the poet's heart and more importantly into his modes of traversal. We can almost hear the universal heart beat in the iambic fall of the stresses: slow ing' my step' . . . the breathtaking imagery of a slowed step is rare in Western poetics, and again I'm reminded of Keats' "And one behind the other stepp'd serene," which contains the same surefooted means of human propulsion.

A "slowed step" is so much more revealing than to just say "he stepped," for slowed is a powerful transitive verb. We're literally slowed down -- invited in as it were, and given a front row seat at the linguistic cinema. On the screen of our mind we see a giant foot, held in suspended animation (perhaps on, but not restricted to, a sidewalk) and our identification is nearly complete. This held sense of perpetual motion is breathtaking. It's as if we too were walking and suddenly felt the mystical compulsion to bring everything to a virtual standstill. This is a poet who is not afraid to take a stand -- to step boldly forth and lead the way into the twenty-first century. We can only trudge humbly behind, with heads bowed in obsequious gratitude.

    The final line "at the wax museum," is, with due apologies to Messrs Elliot, Pound and Williams, one of the most lucid and resonant end lines I've seen in decades. Interestingly enough, "at the" sets up the prepositional magic -- it is so exact, we can sense where we are. "at the," so pregnant and full of possibility. Are we at the dump, at the store, at the university ?. . . No! The poet of lesser vision might easily have settled for one of these common locals. But our poet has dared to make the leap. He has taken us to that mysterious place locked deep in the subconscious of our muted inner child -- the wax museum! And dare I be so bold as to name that city?

At first I thought it was Los Angeles -- but as I pondered the rhythms and internal meanings of the line, it became clear we were in New York. I could "hear" the stagnant gnaw of trash rotting in a nearby basket. I could "smell" the immigrant taxis, and "see" the tinkling bell of a messenger boy, as he peddles through the stall of progress with his careless bundle of packages. Yes, we are in New York and it is hot and our step is slowed. And suddenly we recognize a bit of ourselves in the radiant thusness of this sad tattered man as he melts into the malevolent city like a wax figure in the furnace of our imagination. I will admit that upon reading that last line, I broke down and began to openly weep like a joyous school boy. Never again will I pass the wax museum with an air of detachment. I will lower my gaze in the summer heat and slow my step and never be quite the same again as I pass the wax museum.

Dingus Fulcrum, ESQ.

© Melt Magazine 2001