What All the Sleeping Is For
poems by Amy Meckler

So begun, the life-giving fates of Tess and other compromised Hardy heroines shade the white spaces of Meckler's poems, which nowhere dwell on the human sentiment of an animal miracle. They do record both the urgency of separation from the 'other body'—hers from her mother ('over and over')—and the patience for delayed arrival:   "I felt / the familiar itch of the child I've been making / for years, blurry speck of stemming,/ . . .  I'm traveling toward her stitching / a vision of spine and cage." Unlike those mispaired and mistreated, what lovers break here are not so much their bonds as hers and she blossoms—once even under the lurid smile, then mouth, of poet James Wright, whom she nurses. She half-sees half of Jason in whom the cancer was breeding when she left him and he looks healthy, seems to be marrying her, but "The last time I saw him whole. He asked me, and I said no."

With some waking-from-dream exceptions, the best of these poems don't read like work set upon with a refreshed morning consciousness, but rather, with a new candle. Crows grip a dying friend's morphine drip, lifting her life in their clawhold:   "I heard / there are more people living now on Earth / than have died here in the history of dying, / and I think wherever the crows are from / not all of us get one." Mass murder in 1945 elicits a prayer she worries may be too long or too loud:  "Forgive me if I woke You with it / I'll forgive You for sleeping." Elsewhere, God is a Christian who sleeps on the seventh day—perhaps even Easter—while sea turtles hatch an excess of eggs:   "Bear a thousand / that two may replace you who made them, male and female, / or three; father, mother and memory, /  . . .  then sleep / to wear off the stupor of creating."

Meckler's remarks on her in utero shape-taking—"Quickening and everything after is hurry"—find a companion in another poem:  "I'm unwrapping my future more slowly." She opens the idea of form altogether with a rewarding abstract in concrete, in fact, iron gate, imagery:

I used to be a gate of iron swinging.
I memorized my two directions:
latched and unlatching.

Now I'm thin tin slivers
off my hinges, all holes, all
hiding places and waiting

If you asked me last week
I would have said
I want more body, less spaces.

Now I want the holes and breathing room,
pore, synapse, ridge—higher surface
in sudden collapse.

("On Form")

—MH