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104 A Wilderness of Monkeys David Kirby Tell a little & he is Hamlet; tell all & he is nothing. Nothing has life except the incomplete. —keats A portrait is a likeness in which there is something wrong about the mouth. —john singer sargent At Once Starkly Simple and Endlessly Ambivalent The most beautiful sentence in the English language consists of the UIJSUZOJOFXPSETUIBUPQFOi5IF'BMMPGUIF)PVTFPG6TIFSwi%VSJOH the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country.” What is it about this sentence that charms so? Surely it is not the hard road the traveler is following but the prospect of respite, for we have all passed through dreary tracts to some place of warmth and cheer, and that place has been all the warmer and cheerier for the dreariness that preceded it. :FUOPUJDFIPXJOEJTUJODU1PFTXPSETBSF'SPNUIFNPNFOUXFmSTU put pencil to paper, we are told to use concrete imagery. But Poe’s images are hardly worthy of the name. Neither the man nor the horse is described, not the land they pass over nor the sky above them. Yet we are drawn in: clip, clop we go on the way to our reward. It’ll be a good one, but we can’t see it, because it lies just outside the margin of the page. Even more than fiction, songs rely on indistinctness. When Johnny Cash sings (in “I Still Miss Someone”) A Wilderness of Monkeys / David Kirby 105 Essays into Contemporary Poetics At my door the leaves are falling A cold dark wind has come Sweethearts walk by together And I still miss someone, who does not see the lonely man looking out on an autumn evening, the light almost gone from the sky as lovers hurry by arm in arm, the leaves crunching under their feet as they hurry off to dinner or a party or a bed as he sees in the shadows the half-forgotten face and figure of someone he can barely stand to think of, someone whose name he can’t utter for fear of the pain its utterance will bring, pain he can only hint at? Yet Cash paints his picture so well that, for a moment, we, too, are that man. As in the Poe story, something better awaits us, and it will please us more because we spent a few moments in the sad man’s shoes. Here’s a third example of indistinctness, this one from The Iliad. When "DIJMMFTTBZT i'BUTIFFQBOEPYFOZPVDBOTUFBMDPPLJOHQPUTBOEHPMEFO maned horses you can buy; but once it has left the circle of his teeth, the life of a man can be neither replaced, nor stolen, nor bought.” The circle of his teeth: you can’t but see not only a skull or a dental chart, possibly your last set of x-rays, but also a figure on his death bed, maybe a warrior on the plains of Troy or an elderly relative or even yourself, just as you can’t not hear the rattling sigh of the last breath as it leaves the body. Recently I heard a poet read a poem about his mother, who had died a few years before, and as a preface, he said that he dreamt his mother was telling “other dead people” about the first time he had sex. In the poem itself, he put flesh on his mother and the sex act itself, but the phrase that stuck with me throughout the reading was “other dead people”: you see them instantly, faceless yet shrouded in their burial garments, motionless yet menacing. And one more example of indistinctness before a few words of explanation. In Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation .BSD'JTIFSOPUFTUIBUi3BEJPMFOETJUTFMGUPOPTUBMHJB UPB pining for the innocence of a summer’s night listening to baseball from a far-off city, the signal fading in and out, the crack of the bat sometimes lost in the sizzle of static from a distant lightning bolt.” You’re not told about the farm kid, the quiet bedroom, the house where Mom and Dad are winding down the day and getting ready for the next one, the dogs 106...

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