Having spent four years stationed on the U.S.S. Eisenhower, I feel, sometimes, I'm destined to see most of my life as one long definition formed from the time I took to watch the ocean. The Atlantic Ocean in particular, whose heave has just enough control to it that I could safely escape onto one of the sponsons above my berthing and enjoy the whatever stretch of the evening that was left to me. An ocean is movement, in every direction, it moves, ceaselessly moving, in large aching piles of water, then smaller pivots, where the water stacks on that, and then even smaller movements at the peak, along the edges. A certain kind of movement that can collapse suddenly, or, as is usually the case, a rise met by a simple fall, and every infinite variety that lies between.
I can't help but think of those oceans when I read Jennifer Moxley's poem "No Place Like" in the Summer 2009 issue of Colorado Review. The poem has that large, inefficient movement to it. Persistent, and troubled, and unapologetic for venturing even into what might be questionably relevant. But the fact is I want these tangents and forays. I want to be carried by the heft inside this poem's voice. Moxley has set a big job, connecting a prophet and Hector Berlioz and then the speaker herself, and I feel that this bond can only be explored through these wide open swaths of thought. So when her language maneuvers through that special combination of distraction and intensity, it feels necessary and appropriate.
Especially as they serve to inform me of the speaker's past, that absence she feels in Paris. The alienation that someone might understand from Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. The language that might satisfactorily describe the difficult Word of God that was whispered into the prophet's ear. What else but an ocean, full of carelessness, full of intent, could justifiably express this, could possibly present a logic that makes these connections so solid and natural, however unlikely they would have seemed otherwise.
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