Made Flesh

Craig Arnold

“She’d ask him, What’s it like to be a girl when you’re not a girl? His answers, when he gave them, weren’t helpful, so evasively poetic: It’s like a sponge somebody else is squeezing. A radio tuned to all stations at once. Like having skin that’s softer but more thick.” The poet, too, is similarly evasive, heavy with imagery and metaphors, at times entrancing, others, befuddling. The meaning of this particular poem is dawning on me, when I think of vicarious living, when I think of giving to others what we cannot seem to embody ourselves, or rather, taking it from them-“The power to feel another appetite pass through her, like a shudder, like a cold lungful of oxygen or hot sweet smoke, fill her and then be stilled.” Though we seem desperate to confirm ourselves through skills aquired or goods produced, desperate to make more real our bursting spirit through artful expression, we are perhaps similarly capable, like spirits of an unseen dimension, of manifesting something, while whelving its loom, by channeling it through another like some marionette, until or if they catch on.

status	In
genre	Literature and Fiction » Poetry
publisher	Copper Canyon Press
publish date	2008
popularity	checked out 0 time(s)