Visibility blocking the view.
Although we associate the manifest with kindness,
we do. The way it goes, where it goes, slight downslope,
Like the word “suddenly,” the incline it causes.
Also the eye’s wild joy sucked down the slope the minutes wave
by wavepack down and slick.
The journey—some journey—visits one.
The journey—some journey—visits me.
Then this downslope once again.
And how it makes what happens
Always more heavily
laden, this self only able to sink (albeit also
lifting as in a
sudden draught) into the future. Our future. Where everyone
is patient.
Where all the sentences come to complete themselves.
Where what wants to be human still won’t show
its face.Like Armantrout’s poems, this twenty-seven-line lyric is written in free verse,
although Graham’s “free verse” is obviously quite unlike Armantrout’s.^7 Gra-
ham’s lines are mostly long and prosaically understressed, but they culminate
in the iambic hexameter of the conclusion: “where áll the séntencés cóme to
compléte themsélves. / Where whát wánts to be húman stíll won’t shów its
fáce.” The move toward metrical stability is not surprising, for Graham’s lyric
exhibits an emotive and temporal coherence. However oblique some of its
images and references, B follows from A here, and C from B in a sequence
that has its own inner logic. One cannot, for example, reverse the order of
these largely grammatical sentences and clauses.
Again, like Armantrout’s, Graham’s language is predominantly abstract:
her poem contains primarily conceptual nouns like “sympathy,” “Compari-
son,” “past,” “joy” “good,” and “kindness,” even as the predominant verb is
the copula, as in “Where is the past?” or “what is keep? A waking good.” But
“Evolution” has none of the gaps we ¤nd in, say, “Direction,” where the line
“Age is a centripetal force” is followed by the words “She can’t hold the ¤ctive
panoply,” with no indication of who “she” is. Nor does “Evolution” use the
casual diction, slang, or popular culture references we ¤nd in Armantrout’s
work. Graham’s language is stately and remote—rather like the language of
The Case of Rae Armantrout 253