monday poem #74: Jeredith Merrin, "Shift"
For once I have a good excuse for posting a monday poem on tuesday, which is that yesterday was still Wiscon. Whee!
I have no memory of why I picked up Shift, or where, or when. But having read it, I bet I picked it up because I was flipping through it and landed on the title poem. I like its form and its informality, its rhyme and irregular meter; its simplicity, its open-endedness; and its subject matter: that moment when you're with someone and something just...shifts.
Shift
How can
I describe a conversation
like this one?
A massive shifting,
as of plates rearranging
along a continental shelf, causing
slight tremors? Maybe.
There are forces we don't see,
a subterranean geography.
Or something like a change
of season-the strange
but ordinary way trees rearrange
shape and color,
standing in the same places? Her
love was neither cure-
all nor catastrophe; not, in lieu
of the usual, a compromise. Go where you
will, do
what you can. As for me,
the scales tipped when she
touched me, just lightly.
- Jeredith Merrin
from Shift
I have no memory of why I picked up Shift, or where, or when. But having read it, I bet I picked it up because I was flipping through it and landed on the title poem. I like its form and its informality, its rhyme and irregular meter; its simplicity, its open-endedness; and its subject matter: that moment when you're with someone and something just...shifts.
Shift
How can
I describe a conversation
like this one?
A massive shifting,
as of plates rearranging
along a continental shelf, causing
slight tremors? Maybe.
There are forces we don't see,
a subterranean geography.
Or something like a change
of season-the strange
but ordinary way trees rearrange
shape and color,
standing in the same places? Her
love was neither cure-
all nor catastrophe; not, in lieu
of the usual, a compromise. Go where you
will, do
what you can. As for me,
the scales tipped when she
touched me, just lightly.
- Jeredith Merrin
from Shift