POEM OF THE DAY: Matt Rasmussen's "Phone"
I just finished Matt Rasmussen's superbly moving book of poems Black Aperture (Louisiana State University Press, 2013), which won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Despite its being a sunny Saturday in New Orleans, I reveled in the opportunity to go deep, deep down with this poet, in and out of dreams, in and out of broken memories, and to experience, alongside him, his grief over his brother's suicide. These poems are saturated with emotion, and yet they shift and slip and shimmer; they never stop moving or surprising you—operating, as they do, out of the associative dream-like logic of grief. And yet Rasmussen performs these unexpected transitions without even a hint of pretension. His poem "Phone" is a perfect example of the dream-world these poems reside in, and the sincere and powerful way Rasmussen brings it to life for us:
PHONE
At the foot of your grave
I planted our black phone
wrapped up in its coiled cord.
I'd hoped its ring would
shudder upward and each blade
of grass become a chime, pealing.
But together we decide
which way the dream goes
like spilled water on a table
we carry across the room.
I wait for the lawn to ring
while the cord sprouts
and a receiver blooms
like a black cucumber.
No one is calling so
I put it to my ear
expecting the steady
dial tone of your voice
but hear only the dark
breathing of the dirt.
At first we are perhaps comforted, as the speaker seems to be, by the fact that he and his brother together "decide / which way the dream goes," and we get the image of them carrying a table with spilled water across the room, one supporting each end (what a remarkable metaphor for the idea of controlling the narrative of a dream!). And yet, by the end of the dream/poem, our (and the speaker's) expectation of communication is shattered by the sound on the other end of the line: nothing but "the dark / breathing of the dirt." What a heartbreakingly truthful summation of the dead-endedness of grief. We can pick up the phone a million times, but the dead will never talk back….
