Yes, he is a
smart, innovative writer. That does not take away from the passion embedded in
his neo-archaeological pieces in the chapbook Numbers (Tulsa: Living Arts Press, 2012). He litters pages with
suggestion. I cull the clues for familiar shards and match them to my own
losses. I see white spaces among the lines— voids that will remain when time
erases my presence.
Titles in
the chapbook suggest slippage of forms: “Three Misreadings”; “Monochrome #4,”
omitting numbers 1-3; “Ten Ways To Write a Sonnet,” which subverts the idea
that a “sonnet” is a known formula; and “Five Easy Pieces,” which is not
composed of easy pieces at all: This final section inverts the second half of
the poem, so it is upside down on the page (I remember a toggle somewhere in
word that flips text). The bottom half of the poem does not exactly mirror the
top half, but rather is a Kantian incongruence like matched but opposing
mittens.
“Monochrome
#4” begins with loss: “Just count out / the hours of aching” (section 1). It
continues with grieving for the paradoxical, as in “your yes a goodbye”
(section 2) and “how much they loved her / til she died” (section 3). Sharp images
add to the sense of incompletion, as in the “blue haze of crystal vases” of
the first section, with its sound-facets
of zee (and near- zee) echoing against each other, as well as the visual “blue” overlay on glass. The work is its own
slab of reality. From Monochrome #4:
1.
Just count
out
distraction,
the blue haze of crystal vases
with wax
flowers held
in
the
embassies of waiting
rooms where
scarves choke
the oak coat
tree in the
name of theology