The Alphabetizer Speaks

Poetry is not to the tastes of everyone, nor even their sensibilities. This is due, in part, to the fact that proper methodologies for reading and enjoying poetry rarely are shared. Two tricks to increase your enjoyment:

• Pay attention to punctuation marks (commas, periods, etc) and adapt your pace of reading from one punctuation mark to the next. This style helps you 'get' the rhythm of the poem.
• Always note line breaks (in which a sentence or clause concludes on a second or even third line from its inception). A good poet makes use of odd-seeming line breaks.

This excellent poem (published in the Paris Review) is a fine opportunity to utilize these suggestions. Moreover, it is well-told, allusive, illusive, even elusive. I marvel at this author's talent.

The Alphabetizer Speaks

I have my reasons

have never known starvation nor plenitude
and unless the order of the world
changes, I won’t.
If the order of the world changes, I will
disappear, the way some vowels
elide into their word-bodies
or an individual blade recedes
into a field each season.

Will my daughter carry on this way?
I cannot yet tell her qualities—
if she prefers scale to chance, sequence to random.
And this may mean nothing.
I find chaos theory appealing, and eavesdrop on talk
of black holes, chasms, any abyss
that fetters sense. I relish
the desultory in many matters,
am slovenly, a slacker, a slave to caprice.
Except with the letters.

There is such thing as a calling
though I cannot speak for prophets or martyrs.
I have been summoned
by people of stature and the low-stationed,
comrade and debutante alike.
My eyes suffer, and my hands, my back.

I am my profession. It is no whim.
I do not want the world a certain way.
The world is that way, and I am a vehicle
on the road of nomenclature. I tend the road.

In my dream, all events coterminous—
no linear narrative, preceding or next.
The odd vignette, lone scene, an image
in isolation, no neighbors.
Then I awaken and pace
my thin balcony, calculating
how much of me waits above, how much
lives below, and I pose
the question of balance. My name
cues the turn home.

-- Patty Seyburn