VOID AND COMPENSATION (ASSISTED LIVING)
Michael Morse

More has been said about
how relationships don’t work

than about how they do.
How do you do?

I walk with you in my head—
walkway and tow-away dovetail

in your skirts and farther in
my head are neednot feelings.

Afeard of hymn, a faineance,
a cleavage, you are from me

a kind of leachate,
fair market, fair catch, fainéant.

This illusory port of you-and-I
needs an animator’s patina,

a seminarian on the prow,
a spiritual coxswain.

Listen to my directorial fervor:
too much Billy Wilder has left me

ill-versed for obstinate prompts,
the way you ignore my birthday,

my reprobate barometer too mints-on-the-pillow,
spoonbait, chocolates as preemptive gestures.

Fair game, fair isle, fair lady—
you build a fence around yourself

of little links: faith, unfaith.
How full I know not how to gauge.

My effete towelette, my sorghum sweet,
where is that handy rustic almanac

of small yet spartan promulgations?
Homesick, I crave a little face-to-face.

So many stories about a girl who for
her boy had big spaces in her heart

only to reshingle the monologue
when siding was the cheaper option.

If I cannot sing the hymn,
I will make myself a myna with some tympani.

I will emancipate the hearsay,
A private kind of media on their kettledrums.

Mania, sweet mainstay: tout a fait.
Will you envy the calm invoice of prior selves

or will you insist on slowly closing doors
and keeping them shut tight?

A space in my heart, you said,
alchemical convening where we were warm

and bright, where we were present tense.
I rent a little room in Stoke-on-Spent:

Your letters to me gray testimony now,
Royalists in the solarium who hum of yesteryears.

A divorce is a kind of legal death; while plaintiff and defendant live on, the third party, the love, the collective future, the corporation, deceases. The literature of lost love fills the anthologies of more glamorous eras, but poetry that sues for emotional peace, that comes to terms with the end of love, is rare. Poetry that is faithful to the oscillating emotions of mourning someone who, confusingly, is alive, is rarer still; a poem that does so without extinguishing the sense of both parties’ resilience is unheard of.In his movingly ambivalent poem “Void and Compensation (Assisted Living),” Michael Morse considers both how relationships don’t work and how they do. In 24 couplets, Morse addresses his ex-wife, grieving their ex-ness, moving steadily through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing, and something like acceptance. There are some comic moments highlighting early-warnings—the ex is a birthday-forgetter—and there is some of the language of daytime self-help shows very difficult to avoid in modern discussions of relationships (what horrible words they are, modern, discussions, relationships). These don’t diminish the poem, which as the mention of Double Indemnity and Some Like It Hot director Billy Wilder indicates, allows for the amusing and irritating sides of serious crises, especially as they contribute to the hubbub.

Setting a fitting tone of uncertainty, Morse bombards the reader throughout with small sonic echoes and little-used words—faineance, cleavage, leachate, for example, or hymn, myna, tympani. A high school teacher, Morse writes poems that reward the lost practice of having a dictionary on hand while reading. Faineance, for example, means idleness, or being lazy because reluctant to work—an obscure reproach the pleasant double entendre cleavage makes a little milder.

It’s not the only meanings and sounds of words that shape the sense of a poem. Morse varies the rhetorical rhythm—the pacing of the sentences—from short hopeful declaratives to subsidiary clauses that trail off into dead-ends. He has the hold on the absolute urgency of his subject needed to make enough momentum of these stops and starts not to run aground.

A characteristic example comes in line 27. Morse gestures toward reconciliation, substituting some odd comic phrases where the personal pronoun suggests pet names will follow: “My effete towelette, my sorghum sweet.” Now, any poet will tell you that the internal rhyme of effete and sweet and the half-rhyme of effete and towelette are entertaining to recognize, but when you throw in the consonance of second half of the line and the peculiar phonology of sorghum—while considering whether the disconnect between the genial fun the speaker has calling the beloved by a funny name and the corresponding unclear feeling the addressee might have being called a feed grain—that’s more than the ear can analyze all at once. That’s our contemporary poetry for you, thriving as a modest kind of too much, especially when in the presence of overwhelming feeling.

Just so, the reader may feel mild excitement and confusion, a combination that does not dissolve as Morse goes on to ask “where is that handy rustic almanac // of small yet spartan promulgations?” While there’s pathos in the paraphraseable meaning of these lines (sweetheart, where did we put the relationship manual), the heightened feeling peculiar to these lines as poetry comes from Morse suspending the reader’s senses just long enough to follow up with the point of this roundabout sweetness: “Homesick, I crave a little face-to-face.”

Not to belabor this point, but this sudden turn is not only a turning point in mourning, it is also the poem’s necessary turn from anger to resignation. Coming after a rambling melancholy echo of love talk, this short sentence more than half long vowels sends the reader through to the sad conclusion with the energy it takes.

I’ve neglected to talk about the rhythm or meter of the poem, which shifts between a comic cha-cha-cha (see the first four lines) and a baroque polysyllabary elsewhere. In the last line, the speaker accepts his distance from his ex- as a historical divide—even her letters are “royalists in the solarium who hum of yesteryears.” It’s far from clear from the rest of the poem who exactly is seeking a return to monarchy. But from the lar in solarium on, the line alternates between stressed and unstressed syllables, a regular music that gives the ending the repose the poem has been seeking.

Morse is a graduate of The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. I first met him when he was teaching poetry in the New York City schools for Teachers & Writers Collaborative. For years I’ve heard his poems at readings and seen them in publications such as Ploughshares, Tin House, and Field. Without fail his work gives the impression of a decent person making the best of things. Over the past few years he’s been publishing new poems with the words “Void and Compensation” in the title. In these chaotic poems of loss he is angrier, funnier, and weirder than before. It’s a pleasure, if a difficult one, to read his new poems in The Canary.

Notes: The name of the British city of Stoke-on-Trent has been modified for effect. A spoonbait is a fishing lure with a metal oval hanging over the hook; “The Spoonbait” is also the title of a Seamus Heaney poem.