Volume 24 223
And a cognate, terra-cotta dust over
everything, with the on-tiptoe atmosphere
of a boule-de-neigebefore it’s shaken.
This is verse that is content to do the work of
figuration done by fine prose before it agonizes
tremulously over how it’s doing as poetry,which is
why its ligatures bind without showing where phrase
was stuffed into clause or image bound onto after-
image in a not very inspired attempt to gild natural
ineptitude with inspired clumsiness. More than just
a few lines of Santos’s verse need to be under one’s
belt before it becomes apparent that his prevailing
unit of composition is the line rather than some
prosodic subparticle. Not, it should be noted, a line
reminiscent of a printed circuit board, with transis-
torized energy nodes pulsing out regularized rhyth-
mical patterns in the form of stresses which recur
with only minor variations throughout the length of
a poem. Santos now seems to be of the opinion that
for a poem to really be a poem its poetry must be
generated out of the words that constitute its forward
motion and not those that self-regardingly thrust
themselvesforward against momentum’s perpendic-
ularizing grain. Poets with tin ears—and there are
more of them out there, duly subsidized with grants
and academic sinecures, than you might think—
seldom luck into such realizations, and even when
by some quirk of fortuity they do, inadequate tech-
nique brings the chatterbox of weights and counter-
weights crashing down. Santos, unlike them, is
blessed with a truly remarkable ear. He can nego-
tiate curves of sound, catching waves of rhythmic
energy on the fly as though a poem of his
couldn’t complete its course without a version of
rack-and-pinion steering and the tightest of front-
end alignments. Watch how this is done in the
singularly compact (and stanzaless) “Pilot Stars,”
where a woman, having returned to her parental
home to visit her father, a retired Air Force pilot di-
agnosed with cancer, lies in bed and recalls the child-
hood experience of having sat in his lap staring at
the cockpit lights of a plane cruising at 10,000 feet:
... And it’s on her skin
as she’s lying there, the salt and shine
of leaning into him through the tight half-circle
of that moonward bend, then leveling it out,
leveling the world in one loosening turn
for a girl lightheaded at the prospect of a life
taken up somehow on the scattered narratives
of all those names, those heart-logged syllables
by which her father found a way
(o, how far the fall from childhood seems)
to chart his passage between heaven and earth...
This is verse as effortlessly maintained aloft as its
progress is kept free of bumps, grinds, and other
distentions of rhythmic plaque non-stanzaic verse
is heir to. The “heart-logged syllables” alluded to
are the names of constellations—Lyra, Cygnus,
Aquila—her father steered his course by, and which
now are lodged in her mind as compass settings of
the mortal illness that would soon take his life.
Now, none of this would be of any poetic value
were Santos’s tracking ability, which is to say his
control of story,not equal to the stabilizing effects
of his inner gyroscope which keeps everything
from capsizing into doggerel. And what that story
culminates in is the daughter’s realization that the
sound of footsteps that she hears pacing back and
forth in the bedroom above her own is the sound
of her father’s “slow, / incessant, solitary dying”
that would go on
another eighteen months, and by which it seemed
some terrible mourning had already begun
to extinguish the light-points one by one,
until the dark like the dark she fell through then
was suddenly storyless, boundless and blank.
Cancer, too, is a constellation, and the celestial
crustacean it inscribes among the stars signals,
within the earthly microcosm of human cells, the
extinguishment of pilot lights. As approaching
death snuffs them out one by one we are left, like
the woman in the poem, weightless in a storyless
dark as boundless as the space separating sidereal
flickers and cytological meltdowns. But it is to San-
tos’s credit that his poem never generates the emo-
tional mildew that ponderings of mortality come
home to roost can all too easily give rise to. He lets
the reader liberate whatever coruscations his rebus-
in-verse might have trapped between its lines.
There’s no moralizing before or after the fact.Portrait of a Couple at Century’s EndHe can negotiate
curves of sound, catching
waves of rhythmic energy
on the fly as though a poem
of his couldn’t complete its
course without a version of
rack-and-pinion steering
and the tightest of front-
end alignments.”