“It happened” is the first thing you need to know reading Lisa Lewis’s poem, “Logical Argument” (from Annulet 6) What happened? It’s not clear. And it’s not even clear if “it” was the “logical argument” that’s standing at the top of the poem. Maybe “it” is something that happened, and now, following the “logical argument” this is the state of affairs described in the poem. And though there is part of me that wants to cast the consequential “it” as a domestic disagreement, especially given the poem’s use of “we” in the opening that separates out to a “you” and “I” later, I find I’m more inclined to a reading that pins the poet and her partner inside the house. Where “it” is an argument between the household and the people who have some problem with what the couple does to their house. The brick of the walkway. The cars in the driveway gasping after a long rain.
What exactly is the conflict, then? And how can the poem put forward a logical reaction to this logical argument they are combatting? I would like to think the poem’s form has an especially strong argument for not making any of this clear. Is it something about planting the wrong trees? Was it something someone overheard while they were walking by? Conflict can be sharpened by specifics. This poem, however, has left left all the specifics packed inside the “it” of the opening. And the result is a stew of many disagreements over many years, and all of them refusing to be resolved.
Like how each line of the poem feels so intent to dwell on whatever assumptions led to the conflict some time in the past and were borne out of it. And now everyone just keeps talking about it. The heavy influence of whatever occurred complemented by the heavy knowledge that everyone still remembers what happened. It’s a poetics of the domestic spaces where they absorb what people are thinking and feeling. Both the people inside the house, and those outside. A home lets things like this linger. The line, “we want to be able to look back and make out the walls,” and the mystery of what those walls would represent. The walls preserving the home’s intimacy? The walls to keep people out? The walls that mark the existence of a house, and the protection a house should afford those living inside.
What I appreciate most of all is the role of nature in the poem. In particular, the trees that appears towards the end. For the poet, the trees are like a benevolence. A kindness that will “talk to the clay and bitter elms,” that will “send roots to the bottom no matter how deep.” Even holding a hammock at a protective height. I admire the specific roles the tree is supposed to inhabit. But I think what I really enjoy is how the ambiguous and surreal actions the trees take amplify all the ambiguity that had come before. Like the poem isn’t going to be reaching for resolution to the mystery, it’s not going to hint at what might have been the original “logical argument” or “it” that had appeared at the opening to the poem. The poem is going to overcomplicate everything. The poem won’t settle down. Where so much of the poem felt defensive, the poet trapped in her house, a precarious stance to whatever this “it” that happened in the past was, that’s not going to be where the poem rests. It will opt for the supernatural of the natural world!