UNTITLED
Philip Jenks

My pinhole weighs a ton.
Said it was Gospel to legible
Letters. Darkling legions

Of molecule, peril inscrutable
Missing matter. They’d have heads
On platters if _______ made it legal.

“it’s sufficiently vague so the dead
are historically protable” What’s
that? Heard some nothing spinning ahead

There is the opposite of what just was,
Which isn’t to say you aren’t now,
You are—but up ahead is

Your inverted afterthought. Think how
Like destiny already skulks.
Made in and out of metal coal dusted towns

Tons and tongues of rasp, stalks
Of maize, beatings, auction block
Blocked from memory, outlined in chalk.

“My pinhole weighs a ton,” says Philip Jenks. The paradox strikes me as doubly strange and wholly indicative of Jenks as a poet: it is not the thin pin that weighs a ton, but the hole the pin creates. This weighty absence is the poem’s concern, and it might not be too forceful to say that in Jenks’s work, the bewildering ways in which absence presents itself in word and image, and how presence absents itself by the same means, is poetry’s work. The poem that follows, cast in delicate terza rima, never coheres into meaning exactly. And it would be plainly glib to say it coheres into meaning inexactly—it doesn’t do that either. Jenks always feels, always sees, always intuits, the unseen threat of minute reality, the world that occurs beneath the scrutiny of the eye: “Darkling legions // Of molecule, peril inscrutable / Missing matter.” Worse, but true, he sees that matter is itself composed primarily of nothingness, of emptiness, of chaos. Such chaotic perceptions—though “perception” is here the wrong word, for one cannot perceive the unperceivable (save the suspicion that such impossibility is language’s, and hence poetry’s, dearest hope)—may explain the dizzying dislocations of Jenks’s poem. Save for the intricacy of rhyme, of form’s pressure to shape sense, one cannot tell in reading the interior self from the exterior world. What is heard outside the self that writes the poem? What in the poem is more than the poet thinking? The blurring of such glaring opposites is a tremendous, shattering gift. The poem becomes the crisis of the world that will not stay world, and the poet who will not stay poet, but each interblends into each, each threatens each, and every word that frustrates meaningful connection, also forges the possibility of connection being meaningful. Jenks puts us in the crux. It is where he lives—at least in his poems. Nothingness and somethingness—and to define the boundaries more clearly, more definitely, may be to lie. For the pinhole that “weighs a ton” is not merely the pin-pierced, pen-pierced, page. It is also the human eye whose weight is the world it sees. Jenks seems to beg us to remember that the world enters into us through a hole—as if absence is the precondition for existence, and the love that existence deepens and implies.