Nine Years
It felt good on the way to the store
then in it
The fan’s artificial wind blew through your tan silk blouse
like a flag of what I was capable of
A rat crawls through my heart
when I think of what you must have done by now with him
Jessie says it takes twice as long as love
Crunch the numbers
Eat them
We’re More Than We Are
I heard a horse walk the night
a door locked my head.
The moon blacked out,
I smoked the music in a bowl.
The hood of my hand was inhuman;
your cock fell from the sky.
Everyone’s head was an eye.
All my life I’ve tried to ruin you,
I heard you say;
then you asked me to jump.
I loved the body to whom that voice belonged.
I thumped.
When saying “Every woman adores a Fascist,” Sylvia Plath may have said it all.
If we’re being honest with ourselves, brutally honest, aren’t we afraid to go through life without someone else holding our hand, leading the way?
If we’re being honest, when we look into ourselves, isn’t it nothing, what we see?
Don’t we fear how little we truly believe in our own values and convictions, how changeable we really are? Doesn’t it scare us, what we might be capable of, left to our own machinations?
But wait.
There’s something there, inside us.
A single constant.
A little thing.
With a gaping mouth.
Love.
Or our capacity to do so.
A baby parasite.
With a big appetite.
Waiting.
For someone.
For food.
Ulyses’ poem “Nine Years” starts by placing us in a sensation of vague, fuzzy contentment; “it felt good.” The stanza ends as ambiguously as it starts, offering us a potentially self-contained thought, a clause that can stand on its own, bite down on its own tail, and also bleed into the next stanza.
It feels true to me that this love poem begins with an ambivalence toward gratification.
Love may coincide with pleasure, but love has never been about pleasure.
When I asked Ulyses if he had any notes about “Nine Years” that he wanted to share, he said:
The third line now appears to me to have too many adjectives, which I was half-conscious of previously, but which I think I unconsciously forgave because I thought that the adjectives somehow attributed a kind of indulgence or luxury or embellishment to the ‘you’ of the poem...all of those adjectives were meant to function together to communicate that the ‘you’ of the poem was at least in part a projection of beauty for the speaker; that the ‘flag’ was composed of a skin-like quality, but whose movement was powered by something fake.
While I think that cutting adjectives can sometimes help a poem better serve its reader, in this case, the adjectives are necessary. They build the poem to a crescendo in which the second and third stanzas work to foil one another.
If anything, I want to know more about the rat, which plays a crucial part in the world of the poem. So much emanates from what this rat is doing, where it is placed, how it is moving. The rat is one of the few moments we are given to know the speaker of the poem, and I wonder if we turn away from that moment too quickly.
The opulence of tan silk, a symbol of what appears possible, almost attainable; the reality of the crawling rat, a diseased and hungry creature avoiding the light, sulking in the chambers of the heart.
Money implies poverty, indulgence implies asceticism, feast implies famine. The beauty of artifice implies reality’s ugly face; love implies its own lack.
One cannot exist without the other.
Like the second and third stanzas push against each other, quietly but no less violent for it, I see an opportunity for the first and fourth stanzas to pull the string linking them together more tautly.
“It,” the noncommittal pronoun that opens and closes the first stanza, could - and I think should - do the same in the fourth, first by cutting out “Jessie says,” and then by adding a second line to better guide the reader, with this line perhaps also ending with “it” as well.
One can imagine what it is that takes twice as long as love, and while it’s not necessary for the speaker to say so just for the sake of the reader, I want to know more about the speaker’s belief in that almost proverbial statement.
“I look back on some of my more imagistically creative poems and think: ‘I shouldn’t have used so many images,’ or that I should’ve been more intentional with which images were serving the poem, as opposed to treating the poem as a kind of landfill for dreamlike lines,” Ulyses told me. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that I have been trying to make my poems more grounded, a word that suggests a humility of imagination and ambition, to stay closer to what’s considered ‘real’ life.”
We know the most about ourselves in how we accept, reject or question beliefs, both our own and those supplied to us by others. Leaving the speaker out of the last three lines of the poem leans the poem too heavily toward the dreamlike, weightless and fleeting, rather than the grounded and real.
Nine Years
It felt good on the way to the store
then in it
The fan’s artificial wind blew through your tan silk blouse
like a flag of what I was capable of [“what” is enticing but maybe too vague here; the repetition of “of” is a nice sonic touch, lulling the reader from stanza 1 to stanza 2, but I feel like this line, in a way, passes me by]
A rat crawls through my heart [what else is the rat possibly doing? what more might be added to bring just slightly more light into this dark space?]
when I think of what you must have done by now with him
Jessie says it takes twice as long as love [to what? while the reader can make several inferences, and I appreciate the temporal callback to the title, I think I’d rather see some additional specificity here in particular; I think there’s also an opportunity to mirror the first stanza and add a second line that ends on “it”]
Crunch the numbers
Eat them [strong directives make for a strong ending; playing around with the verbs here could do a lot to change the “message” of the poem and could be an interesting exercise]
The final couplet in “Nine Years” is a series of imperatives, two commands for an unknown subject. “Numbers” calls back to the title of the poem, and “eat” in the context of the poem seems to connote destruction over nourishment, a ravening.
Ulyses said he worried about the reader’s resistance to two imperatives at the poem’s end, but in my experience reading the poem, the imperatives did the opposite.
The body searches for something to succumb to; rules provide that structure and control. Especially in a poem that begins with moments as soft in mood and texture as this one, the shift in tone to commanding the reader at the conclusion of the poem feels as startling as it is necessary.
If the poem is a world, imperatives are a map. We can dramatically alter what we do to our readers with even small changes to these directives, whether we pick a slightly different verb or add modifiers. “Eat them” is different than “Bite them,” “Swallow them” or “Spit them out”: there are endless opportunities for play.
If Ulyses is worried about resistance, I’d ask: What is it that you want the reader to surrender to?
We’ [A]re More Than We Are
I heard a horse walk the night
a door locked my head. [I think this phrase feels too skewed toward surreality to serve the poem as well as it could]
The moon blacked out,
I smoked the music in a bowl.
The hood of my hand was inhuman; [would replace semicolons with commas to help with the flow of the poem, unless a stronger pause feels warranted]
your cock fell from the sky. [this phrase, placing the “you” above the speaker, feels at odds with the poem’s last two couplets]
Everyone’s head was an eye. [more is potentially needed to make the presence of “everyone” feel palpable in such an intimate poem]
All my life I’ve tried to ruin you,
I heard you say;
then you asked me to jump.
I loved the body to whom that voice belonged., I [then] thumped.
While surrealism and lucidity may feel diametrically opposed, they can also feed off of each other, paradoxically using the contradiction of their coupling so that each may make the other stronger.
At its best, the host-parasite relationship fails on itself: it becomes symbiotic.
In “We’re More Than We Are,” the ocean of the surreal brings to the surface the reality of the corporeal: the speaker, in a world with a blacked-out moon where everyone’s head is an eye, loves “the body to whom that voice belonged,” something firmly in the domain of the tangible.
From the atmosphere of the surreal spring moments of stark, focused clarity: “All my life I’ve tried to ruin you.”
The poem is balanced precariously between these two lovers: the real and unreal, the speaker and subject.
Ulyses told me of a “struggle to reconcile sincerity and surreality” in his writing:
[T]he dreamlike quality of some of my earlier poems [has] been tampered in an effort to write from a place more ‘real’ than ‘imaginative’ or ‘fantastical.’ I just think that surreal writing can be dismissed as not being authentic enough, or of not speaking to the important matters in life.
Yet dreaming is a part of our real lives, and in fact I often wake from dreams struggling to determine whether they were instead a memory, disturbed by the extent to which they toy with my reality.
We rely on information from the body to bestow upon us our sense of truth. This system is a fragile one, and it is the only one we have.
If the poem is a painting, the poet must decide where to brush broad, soft strokes and where to trace careful outlines. Where to smudge shadow and where to focus light.
There are opportunities for additional framing in “We’re More Than We Are” to ensure the authenticity Ulyses seeks without sacrificing the power they draw from the deep well of the surreal.
Sonically, altering the title to “We Are More Than We Are” creates a subtle mirroring, a pattern to ease the reader into the poem’s world.
Similarly, modifying the word choice in the poem’s final line to mirror the final line of the preceding stanza ends the poem almost like a nursery rhyme or lullaby: something to take us, childlike, from our waking world into that other one.
Additional consideration to the actual physical placement of the “I” and “you” of the poem could also help with the reader’s grasping. Parts of the poem’s “you” fall from the sky; the speaker hears their voice and their request; the speaker thumps.
While poems have a logic all their own, that logic still has its own set of rules; I wonder if those rules and their logic might need to further solidify.
And how does “Everyone” else fit into the dialogue between the speaker and object of the poem?
Lovers are notoriously selfish creatures: attention to anything outside of their cocoon calls for some form of justification or explanation, which may in turn add sufficient gravity to the poem to bring it slightly closer to Earth, close enough for us to touch.
I wonder if there is a way to stop lovers from eating each other.
Maybe that’s antithetical to the logic of love, which is perhaps a child of violence and hunger, not uniquely human but instead as insinctual and impersonal as anything an animal does.
To be considered for a future Body Composition newsletter, please email 2-5 poems and a biographical statement to fmkrit@gmail.com.
“I wonder if there is a way to stop lovers from eating each other.” Girl, lmk!!!