Free Mosquito by Alex Lemon Page A

“cooked,” orderly terms here, not when
you’re “starfished in sky / Spinning days.”
    The poem continues:
    Each day nurses wore their best
Tinfoil skirts, buried
Their caresses in my side
    Â 
    While pillows whispered
In spite of your scars you are tickled
To death of life.
I couldn’t understand this
    Â 
    Always being held. Lung-machines
Sang louder. Wave song & useless.
Midnights & swearing. Blue.
    It’s a wonderful, unexpected turn, what those pillows have to say; this is no moment when we’d expect to meet an affirmation. But the flesh wants to live: the body’s greatest imperative is to continue. That line and stanza break after “I couldn’t understand this” is cunningly placed; it makes us read the line as a part of the sentence before and of the sentence below. In other words, I couldn’t understand why I’d be happy to live, and I couldn’t understand this “always being held,” the caresses, the engines and practices of care bearing the speaker through difficulty.
    It’s telling, too, how syntax breaks apart here, sentences growing shorter and shorter as the forceful verbs that are part of this poet’s signature fall away. Now we’re floating in a state
where time (and its vehicle, the sentence) has been atomized. “Wave song & useless. / Midnights & swearing. Blue.” In the depth of the body’s night, we’re suspended in mere fragments of speech, all that can be voiced here.
    And now the poem enters its final moments:
    Who prayed for me—my thanks
    Â 
    But I can’t keep anything down.
Who knew it had nothing to do
With the wind by how light
Flickered with falling knives?
    No easy affirmation there; the speaker can’t keep down, presumably, food or prayers. The light outside the window is itself dangerous; the world’s a treacherous place, and yet the creaturely self relishes being alive in it. We’re taken right back to the italicized passage, midpoem, with its key line: “ To death of life. ” Here the poem’s central terms are placed in bald opposition, both linked and separated by the space/silence/caesura between them; they’re the two poles of the world, the inseparable north and south of things, yes and no, one and zero.
    What keeps this affirmation believable and vital is, of course, how realistically guarded it is; the speaker may be “ tickled / To death ” to be alive, but it’s the knives that have the last word. Though here knives might be said to be good things; aren’t they the instruments of the speaker’s delivery? He tells us, after all, in “The Best Part,” that the “sweetest ingredient” of brain surgery “is the cutting. Hollow space / that longs to be
filled with what little I have.” Even that violation of the creaturely self has a beauty to it; the opening of the self points to the possibility that it might be filled with something else.
    But it’s not simply polarity that makes Lemon’s poem an amulet and charm against the speechlessness of suffering. The harnessing of opposites is, instead, a characteristic of his style, which is the agency of his magic.
    Style, that amalgam of the found and the made, the improvised and the adapted, can be the meeting ground between self and world. A means of self-presentation is forged, and in doing so the contents of individual experience can be signaled, given shape. The pain of others—just like their joy or pleasure or wit or desire—can remain entirely invisible to us unless it is given utterance, but plainspoken language generally fails to carry much of a depth charge. Not long ago, at a university in the north of England, a reader asked me if I couldn’t just come out and say things; did I need the appurtenances of metaphor, the fancy dress of linguistic performance? No matter that to state how I’m feeling or thinking might take me a