Coming Back

In “Awl,” Naomi Cohn describes a “small tool, a small slip of the hand, a small injury.” Yet that seemingly minor episode yields enormous consequences. As a three-year-old, Louis Braille stabbed himself in the eye with an awl, a “tool for piercing holes.” The wound destroyed the boy’s sight. Braille’s blindness, in turn, inspired him to design a writing system for the visually impaired.

“Is it accident,” Cohn wonders, “that my tool for pressing hand-punched Braille is so much like a blunt, very small awl?” Her tool, too, can “pierce holes”—a nod to the incisive power of writing.

 

•

 

“Tattered surveillance blimps / yank against steel tethers over the saltlick plain,” writes Eliza Griswold in “Pulling Out,” which describes withdrawal from a war-torn territory. People find themselves “tethered” in another sense: “The flimsy means / by which we try to distance war // don’t matter anymore.” The rhyme of “war” and “anymore” supports that point; it chimes across a stanza break, linking the disparate blocks of text.

The lucky can board airplanes—but even their refuge is limited. “Take to the air, stare down // on the terrible mirror of the ground / where those who didn’t qualify // for tickets to the sky / wave goodbye, goodbye.” If the ground is a “mirror,” then the escapees see themselves among the trapped; despite their departures, they remain, in a sense, in the war zone. Hence the verb tense of the poem’s title: its speaker is still working through her experiences, still in the process of “pulling out.”

 

•

 

“This disease has come back,” writes the late Meena Alexander in “Revenant.” She fantasizes about doing the same: “to be well again, what might that mean?”

The word “revenant” originates in the French “revenir,” which means “to come back.” In English, it refers to a person who has returned, particularly as a ghost—and it thus encapsulates both the hope for health and the possibility of death. Alexander mentions “shades of another water” and “late snow.” Like “revenant,” “shades” and “late” perform double-duty by hinting at mortality.

Alexander ponders not just her own fate, but also the longevity of her work: “Only a few survive if that— // Poems I mean.” “Revenant” has indeed survived Alexander, and it provides her with a means of coming back to us.

 

•

 

In Jana Prikryl’s “Asylum,” the speaker takes refuge in language: “like when I can’t sleep I say to myself / the the the the / the // the / the—….” Definite articles usually communicate a sense of certainty, but here, each “the” refers to nothing in particular, and the reiteration creates an effect of nervous stammering. Accordingly, the poem describes a nerve-wracking situation: “the the the the the the the the / papers say asylum is temporary / now.”

Throughout, the poem embodies the tension between the temporary and the permanent. Belief, Prikryl writes, is “always being / cut in on—the // the / the / the the the the the the.” Even as “Asylum” repeats the same word, it “cuts in on” itself, with em-dash, stanza break, and line breaks. In so doing, it captures the effort to hang on to continuity in the face of disruption.