open Cabbage Gardens, remains elusive. Indeed, the oblique narrative that
follows, which begins with the lines
The enemy coming on roads
and clouds
aeons.
cashel has fallen
trees are turf
horizon thanks to myself, yes
pacing the study.^34seems to have no identi¤able lyric subject. Here, Howe’s detractors would say,
is a cryptic Language poem that denies the very possibilities of the expres-
sivity one wants from lyric.
Or does it? Consider the leitmotif of framing and being framed that runs
through both prose preface and visual poems, crisscrossing, in myriad ways,
the related motifs of war and colonization. The frontispiece (¤gure 4) is an
engraving from Frank Severance’s Picture Book of Earlier Buffalo, based on
“an original sketch by Lt. Jesse D. Elliott, accompanying his report to the Sec-
retary of the Navy on the Capture of the Detroit and Caledonia, dated Black
Rock Oct. 9, 1812.” “The Second Oldest View of Buffalo,” as this depiction
of schooners going up in smoke is captioned in Howe’s book, thus immedi-
ately introduces the motif of war, in this case the War of 1812 (Frame Struc-
tures 1).
But if this is the “Second Oldest View of Buffalo,” what would the ¤rst
look like? For Howe, origins cannot be known. “Lines represent the limits of
bodies encompassed by the eye” (5). The section “Floating loans” contains a
historical sketch of Joseph Ellicott’s acquisition and settling of the land in
upstate New York that was to be called Buffalo. We can take in the facts, but
we cannot quite visualize the resulting city. “Space is a frame we map our-
selves in” (9). When we ¤nally do “see” the Buffalo harbor in the engraving,
we are witnessing a war scene: war, for that matter, is very much this poem’s
condition. At the same time, “a picture,” as Wittgenstein puts it, “held us
captive”;^35 neither poet nor reader can get beyond the engraving, the stylized
image, to experience the “reality” of Buffalo. This is why names become so
tantalizing—Nicholas Van Staphorst, Christiaan Van Eeghen, Paul Busti—we
yearn for, but cannot get at, what’s behind them. And consider the absurdity
of calling a city Buffalo. “Clans and individuals adopt the name of animals,”
Howe remarks, “cities seldom do.” And she adds, “Prefaces are usually after-
images” (13).^36
Silliman’s Albany, Howe’s Buffalo 147