What I admire in Amy Woolard’s poem, “Late Shift” is the construction of lateness, especially as you’re looking back from a later moment in life, or feeling like you might have been too late to really appreciate the life you were experiencing at that time. Young adulthood is strange, because it’s easy to reflect on how foolishly serious I was about it (something I read this poem speaking to), but also how much of young adulthood defines the person I’ve eventually become (something else I see in this poem). It’s like Amy Woolard celebrates her nostalgia for this past life, wondering how much of it lingers in her present life and how much she can see she left behind.
Maybe this distinction shouldn’t be read as an either/or situation. And maybe Woolard intentionally muddles the either/or quality memories can have for someone. For me, this complicated arrangement appears most in the poem’s transitions. For instance, when she moves from the micro-vignette of the poet kissing the line-cook to an assertion about her past fitting with her present.
…the obscene puckered red of maraschino, the wrecked
Line cook in the walk-in. His chilled kiss. How it tastes like a future
Eviction. Thieves in the temple of our bodies. Years later I will
Still feel most at home when I eat standing up.
On one hand, this moment in the poem describes a reckless romance the poet had with this line cook. It’s something to remember a bit more realistically than she would have framed it at that time. And the transition starting with “Years later” could easily allow for the poet to reflect back on what this memory of romance means to her, but it doesn’t. I think the poet has moved on to something more general, how she realizes how meaningful it was to stand while eating. The transition puts me in mind of Deborah Landau’s work. I’ve always been fascinated by her shift from phrase to phrase. The sensuous assertions that I hear with each transition. In “Late Shift,” from Woolard, I would say the sentence has similar velvet openings and velvet conclusions. And as you move to the next sentence, you experience what I might call a reorientation, or a reconsideration of what life was when the poet worked a “late shift,” and how that was has an ambiguous relationship with what is currently for the poet.
Like these memories operate inside her like a sentence would. With one sentence leading to the next, the strange cohesion that resembles how memories string together. But in Woolard’s case, it’s not clear what role those memories should have in the poet’s present life. Are they shameful? Is it like the image she uses: “in my lungs still nests the fur of every animal I / ever kept”? Or is it that the sum total of these memories will be the fierce and sleek snow leopard “the gods will have [her] cough up” from all that fur?
I think the complicated relationship between the poet and her memories is best illustrated in her consideration of Bruegel’s Icarus. The poem observes the painting’s inconspicuousness in portraying the fall. Where you might not even look if you hadn’t known you were supposed to. But also the poem observes how ready an analogy Icarus represents—a life eager for light, especially a “light // To love [the poet] back,” and also a life told so often in stories, it feels easy to just start the story over from the beginning.
What Woolard’s poem might most value from her past young adulthood is its fluidity, the loves separated from each other “like cupping a yolk between the cracked half // Shells.” It’s a tender poem, kind to the poet’s past. Nostalgic for it, and also reckoning with the full scope of having lived through it and since it.