How surprise unfolds like slow moving silk kerchiefs. I’m surprised. But I’m slowly surprised. Like if I was commenting on what it feels like being surprised, so it slowed “surprise” a little, I could extend how I feel about it a little bit. Not that Stav Poleg’s poem, “Memory and Geography” is slow-motion. The poem opens on a scene, or comments on what it’s like reading a book where you feel the scene open. That’s the extent of a slow down. The poem makes you think what it’s like when a book opens on a scene, how does it feel compared to that scene in a movie, or a river going past where you’re standing.
Or what about when I woke up this morning, and there was a film crew outside my window filming my favorite scene, but it wasn’t something I’d have read in a book, it just felt like it. But I still look at the main character and think of how delighted I am with the actor they cast. It’s like someone I would have imagined when I was reading a book.
What Poleg does with surprise is let it appear in a turn of phrase, and then she submerges it in another turn of phrase, and there’s all this inefficiency to these kinds of surprises. But it’s OK. It’s how the discursive feels. It’s what it feels like to me each time I open a book to read, like the prosaic is sand, and it takes so much work walking through sand, but the prose is making a world I can occupy. Poleg’s poem is what “occupied” feels like as a sensation. Each of these impressions she considers, reconsider, and counters.
Consider the rain
as two opposite lands—two possible soundtracks
from “Memory and Geography,” by Stav Poleg
for a sleepless, long week—the principle
of uncertainty—the certitude of clarity—something
in between.
The poem doesn’t just give the reader rain, it evokes two different states of rain. And it’s not so hard for me to read the two different soundtracks, and to read the two wildly variable implications into the soundtracks. The uncertainty I feel with some rain. The clarity rain can offer, and how certain I am of it. You know that song, “Rock Me, Amadeus.” I just want to change the words a little so they read, “Discurse me, Poleg.”
Because Poleg just keeps going in this poem. Turning so there’s more thinking about what I’d already thought about. Maybe part of surprise is the familiarity of it, suddenly coming on the familiar, and the delight when you see the familiar. Everything so mundane, and now here’s something I’m familiar with. And what’s the difference if your life is attentive to what might be surprising. I’m ready to be surprised, and life is so much filled with surprise. Why would T. S. Eliot say life was too much with us if there were always going to be surprises that are part of life?