The End Inside It

On the radio, Merce said, Do it backwards.Jump first, then run,even when it was just with his arms, when he got old,even if some people hated it.

—Jean Valentine, from Break the Glass

Or Closure, as it's called among poets, but not a "We need closure on this" sort of thing, certainly not that cheap and cheesy "because we have to get on with our lives," though at the end of all poems is the return to the day as it was, its noon light or later, supper and whatever madness long over, reading in bed those few minutes, next to the little table lamp. But to come out of the poem's tunnel of words—the best way is to be blinking slightly, released from some dark, eyes adjusting, what was ordinary seen differently now. Or not. At times the shift from reading to not reading is so graceful it's transparent, the poem itself Robert Frost's "piece of glass" skimmed from winter's icy drinking trough and held up to melt and melt the real world into real dream, then back, his moment of clarity unto mystery returned to clarity again. Of course, that actual gesture comes early in his "After Apple Picking," a poem full of what might "trouble" his dreams in the wake of such hard work. Its last line is one low-key gulp, his "Or just some human sleep" itself following something about exhaustion more wistful and weird: "Were he not gone,/ The woodchuck could say whether it was like his/ Long sleep, as I describe its coming on. . . ." As in—hey! Let's ask this woodchuck here, shall we? And how absolutely odd and brilliant that we never see this move as comic, though it could be right out of Bugs Bunny or The Simpsons, depending on when you started to find things funny. But Frost isn't funny, at least not in this poem, where sleep isn't exactly sleep either.

Such sleight-of-hand only proves how tone can control things, and that success, if not triumph, in a poem is largely in the accumulation of word, syntax, cadence tangled and guided by two seemingly warring elements—a most particular fever and tact, right to the end. Plus how unexpectedly but inevitably any final moment emerges out of all that has gone before, the rise and fall, the order of those choices as they press a wayward, fierce descent down the page or in the air to make the poem mean. "Theme alone can steady us down." Frost wrote that, too. And maybe it's true, though we don't much use that t-word anymore.

I love what Marianne Moore left behind in an essay: "I tend to like a poem which instead of culminating in a crescendo, merely comes to a close." Note well her "merely"—one of the many things in Moore to put on pause and willfully distrust. But her remark suggests at least two kinds of ending: the grand orchestration vs. the simple okay—shrug—it's over. Frost's "Or just some human sleep" lies clearly in this second category, though something remains vulnerable and lasting in that sound. The choices here—the poet's or, his just, his some—all together now: his "or just some human sleep"—conspire to a studied indifference, an almost indifference in spite of that wide-eyed "human" there. More, that "human" up against an animal's apparent untroubled sleep makes sudden and eerie how unknowable we ourselves are. News flash: words mean things. And human here at the bottom of all that comes earlier, its underscored double beat cast among this small run of single stressed words is, no, not a crescendo. Moore would have approved, I think, if what anyone thinks might matter to her now that she's past any ending, though of course one could argue she isn't. Her poems, at least, are not. They keep ending. Which is yet another crucial thing about poetic closure.

Whatever Moore's fondness for no trumpeting as a poem slips back into...