Occasionally Barrow Street
publishes a group of poems drawn from a work in progress. For this next-to-last post I’ve selected two
sections of “Zeno in the Dark” by Phillis Levin, a five-part poem which
appeared in Barrow Street,
in Summer 2006, as part of a group of poems revolving around the imagined
character of Zeno.
from ZENO IN THE DARK
IV
Zeno
sits on a chair
crossing his leg
in the dark
which one which one
doesn’t matter
ergo
it matters more
Zeno
sits on a chair
deciding
how to decide
if tomorrow will start
with the left
or the right
V
Then again
if he stubs his toe on the way to bed
if the telephone rings
he will be free to forget
how he got to the end of the hall
he will be free
to consider other things
how he came to the same place\
by a different door
how zero can swallow any number
or be at peace
inside another
how a leaf in the wind is a river of color
how the blanket he likes to pull to his chin
was knit by his mother
whose skin is as silky and cracked
as a map he found when he lost himself
in a station in a dream
in a city he has still never seen
-- Phillis Levin
Each part of “Zeno in the Dark” is complete in itself, but
together they add up to a tonally complex whole. I’ve chosen to post IV and V, two parts of
the poem, because at least two are needed to show what this brilliant, witty,
and ultimately mystical poem is up to.
Hovering behind the character in this poem is Zeno of Elea,
a fifth-century B.C. Greek philosopher known for his paradoxes, especially
paradoxes involving motion. But Phillis
Levin’s Zeno is a philosopher for the twenty-first century, a simultaneously
funny and poignant figure, trapped by dilemmas of his own making. Sitting on a chair in the dark, crossing and
re-crossing a leg, he is unable even to decide “how to decide” which leg to
begin walking with. The section is rife
with short lines, repeated words, and line and stanza breaks which force
readers repeatedly to revise their prior readings. These devices mirror, and in part enact, the
character’s thought-induced paralysis: “deciding / how to decide / if tomorrow
will start // with the left / or the right”.
Section V, the final section of “Zeno in the Dark,” sketches a way out
of the dilemma.
For Zeno, the way out is only a possibility: “if” he stubs
his toe (jolted by pain into awareness of the external world); “if” the ringing
telephone recalls him to, literally, his senses (his sense of hearing); then he
may be moved to consider a range of possibility beyond sterile intellectual
questioning. But what is only a
possibility for Zeno is an accomplished fact for the reader. In the four sections beginning with “how,” we
are made to experience a series of compressed, highly lyrical re-imaginings of
the world. They include the
transformation of zero from an abstract mathematical element to a quasi-alive
being; the intensely lyrical rendering, in a single sentence, of the natural
world and its extreme beauty (“how a leaf in the wind is a river of color”);
and finally (and most mysteriously), how Zeno’s mother’s skin “is as silky and
cracked / as a map he found when he lost himself / in a station in a dream //
in a city he has still never seen.”
In this final section, we move through a “different door” –
the brilliant lyricism and speculation of the poem itself – to find our own
world transfigured: now an expansive and mysterious realm, which can’t be
rendered in any words but the poem’s own.
-- Patricia Carlin
