On Crickets and Insomnia

There is no fiction here. Field’s subtitle is “Contemporary Poetry and Poetics.”  The issue contains 48 poems and five review-essays.  Let’s look at a few of the better poems.

Crickets figure in two of the poems.  In Lance Larsen’s “To a Cricket,” the little “darkling fugitive” is loose in the speaker’s kitchen in the wee hours of the morning, “thrum[ming] / like hunger.”  The speaker tries three times “before landing you in the cage / of my sleepy hand.”  The dilemma: whether to free it, an “early Sabbath amnesty,” or feed it to his son’s pet tarantula, from whose “inn” he has escaped.  Larsen’s short poem and simple language portray a man in the throes of a life or death decision at a time when he should be asleep.  That we care about both the man and the cricket’s fate is the poem’s achievement.

Another noisy intruder shows up briefly in Sarah Green’s “Prayer,” an even better poem with an even louder cricket.  This one, “on the back porch, / chirping like a smoke detector out of / reach, out of batteries,” manages to stay a month before disappearing.  But a few nights later, “the pipes have started up their steamy / midnight conversations with the radiators,” waking the speaker “with their foreign / consonants.”  In the speaker’s “sleeplessness of want, the sleeplessness / of have”—call it insomnia—she is condemned to “startled mornings—angling the light, checking / the time.”  Green captures a state we’ve all been in and paints it vividly without needlessly offering us a solution.

Insomnia, like crickets, appears in two poems, the second being Tony Trigilio’s “Insomnia.”  Except for “sirens outside / my bedroom window / whistling seedy songs,” the source of the speaker’s sleeplessness is vague, almost existential: "Too much of anything/ and my apartment feels/ like a panic room,/ a box that traps/ August in Chicago."

“Too much of anything” captures the sense of being overwhelmed that muffles out rest.  The “box” traps not only the sense of “August in Chicago,” but the speaker himself, feeling boxed in.  I’m not sure about “panic room”—it feels literal, as an insomniac’s room would be one conducive to panic.  “Panic room” is better off implied by the rest of the sentence.  My favorite verb in the poem is in the phrase “the alarm clock / wedged on the sill.”  The clock is of course holding up the window for the hope of a breeze, a sense of life.  Likewise, isn’t the speaker himself feeling “wedged” into this box from which there is no escape until morning?

Marjorie Saiser’s powerfully declarative (and incidentally rhyming) title, “I Am Done Raising a Son,” captures the fierce mood of her poem.  She juxtaposes a series of child-rearing images with a visit to a beluga swimming in a zoo.  The beluga evidently conjures memories of her son, though we are not told why, nor should we be.  The speaker’s memories begin with the birth:  “I bore down in a brown haze / and pushed him out into the doctor’s gloved hand.”  We see her polishing baby shoes, feeding him, buying him a kite, driving him to school—and then, out of seemingly nowhere: "The beluga circles in her tank at the zoo,/ a great tank and very pretty, but a tank,/ and in it she circles."

The beluga, because of the structure of the poem, conjures memories of her son, and yet I can’t help but see a similarity between the way it circles in the tank (the circling mentioned twice)—a “very pretty” tank, “but a tank”—and a mother’s obligations.  The speaker informs us that the beluga is female:  “Her hand -- for it is a hand -- / palms water.”  That “hand” becomes another memory:  “I held his hand a thousand times, / heard him cry, / opened my eyes in the dark.”  Finally, back to the beluga:  “Bones of a hand / wave toward what lies beyond the glass.”  Is the speaker done raising a son because he has grown?  Has she, so to speak, washed her hands of him for some other reason?  Saiser leaves enough room for interpretation to make this one of the issue’s more intriguing and dramatic poems.