Rickey Laurentiis' "Study in Black"

In the current issue of Poetry, I read Rickey Laurentiis poems, among which "Study in Black" is particularly striking.

The epigraph," Tu Fu, 'Thoughts While Traveling at Night,'" prepares us for the nature imagery. But Laurentiis' use of unusual line lengths, line breaks, appositives, double dashes, alternating long and short lines and indentation take us into the meditative space of not just Tu Fu but this particular speaker who sees his words as limiting. Not just that. But the speaker calls himself a "spook bird" a violent image of poet and bird roped and alone, rotting.

Ironically, the whole poem has a lightness to it like the "wind in the grass" we are introduced to in the opening line--the lightness is maintianed in phrases like "there here," and the amazing number of internal rhymes--"down"-"ground," "wonder"-"plainer," "injuries"-"me," "know"-"solo"-"roped;" off-rhymes as in "boat"-"mast"-"night," "moon"-"skin," and assonance as in "fame"-"age," "injuries."

 

Although the poet tries not to be dark in the beginning, the poem inevitably arrives there. The sky is a solemn witness. Is this what we feel like when we cannot produce art?