For
poets, often what remains at the end of the day, first thing in the
morning or somewhere in between changing diapers, taking care of business
and mowing the lawn, are poems. Always, the poems. They aren’t castoffs
or remnants, but the most determined of memories, stories, insights,
images and items polished and made to gleam—exactly what the poems
in What Remains, Ryan Tranquilla’s recently published chapbook collection,
accomplish (Conflux Press, 2007).
In What Remains, Tranquilla
introduces readers to a hypnotic and lulling world, a neighborhood
of tickling grasses, fences and panting dogs. But even as the reader
is introduced to this urban pastoral, there is the admission in the
opening poem, whose title acts as a first line, “The first thought
to my mind/is usually a lie,” letting us know there’s something subversive,
dangerous even, behind this vision of calm domesticity. It may be
“a cool/spring afternoon harboring a warm hint of summer,” but there’s
restlessness and calculation in a speaker who admits,
…I ripen
like a lemon, sourness veiled
behind a sunny yellow rind. I worry my
days like a crossword
puzzle, picking at each empty square for the
correct response,
the proper pose…
Tranquilla echoes Jean Cocteau’s
statement, “the poet is a liar who always speaks the truth,” when
the speaker asks, “What can a story, or,/better, a lie, not tell us?”
What it can tell us is everything we need to know. In the persona
poem “Bess Houdini Says Farewell to Her Husband Harry, Ten Years After
His Death,” the device, or lie, at work—the poet speaking as Bess
Houdini—doesn’t make what the poem reveals about the bonds of love
any less real or truthful, but brings it into sharp relief.
In
the title poem “What Remains,” also a persona poem, a driver swerves
to avoid a squirrel and in doing so injures possibly a neighbor or
a passenger. What matters is that the accident has somehow created
a security breach in both of their lives. While visiting the victim
in the hospital, the speaker unsuccessfully tries to undo the damage,
saying,
do not give up your belief
in green lawns
and armed response
security companies,
in the lusty delicacy
that brings butterflies
together
in midair to mate.
One might as well say, Do not give
up your belief in domestic bliss. The lie being revealed here is that
we are safe from chaos. The story told reveals to the reader “the
crumpled fence” and how “At home, fruit rots, black flies breed in
the dryer,/the vent blowing their translucent wings/out with the lint.”
The desire to achieve the idyll is as persistent as the rotting and
small dead things, and the debris left behind.
