“I was yellow next to pink.”

One of the many quotes in this book that has reminded me of his others. This one being of his poem “The Museum” (a dear favorite of mine from the collection, yet perhaps a biased one as an artist) from War of the Foxes.

The reminisced line is as follows:

“Perhaps it was something about yellow next to pink.”

I can’t help but wonder which of these connections are intentional, which a part of everything naturally, and which completely utterly unintentional and somewhat unnoticed by the author even.

This is me quoting larger chunks of text than I usually would. This is me with many quotes and a few thoughts, left in between.

I’m left with lines like:

“And I slept. I slept often and hard. I slept and slept and when I got up the avocados were black and the milk was sour. Sleep was a gap, a stutter in the sentence. Time was thick. It was slow and thick and dark.”

He says things so difinitively, and so how that always gets to me. It leaves no room for argument, and only room for knowing and experiencing. This is not even the instance of a moment where it is most effective, but it is simply in tjis moment I am thinking of this.

“They aim low and sleep well. They get nothing. I got a wheelchair, then a cane, and I used to know some things about an earlier version of you.”

Is there a name for the opposite of the title being present in a text?

“I never turn around because sandwiches are important and he shouldn’t be encouraged to barrel into a room without looking, thinking that it’s safe because rarely is anything safe, and most people aren’t Andy, and they will just take what you say about dinosaurs and twist it around until you sound crazy.”

Actually, I might like a lot of moments in this poem (“Dinosaur”)…

“Also I don’t want to turn around and look him in the face and scare him with my face, which is a sad face, the face of someone going through a difficult thing and not handling it very well.”

He repeats. He breaks down. He fragments. He states. It’s effective and it flows sometimes in ways that feel illegal to grammar but work perfectly just so because it feels it could not be said if with true punctuation and breaks and breathing and room for anything else beyond pushing forward forward forward forwards.

“Once you look something in the face it starts to want things.”

🎶 …honey, don’t feed it, it will come back… 🎶

…Don’t mind me, I’m just connecting two of my favorite creatives’ works in my head.

“He is trying to teach me how to make pasta sauce but I’m not having it because today I am a cowboy. Kid, I have a horse for that. He stops side-kicking imaginary tomatoes with his strong kicks and looks at me. Is he mean? Can we have a meatball party? Where are your boots? And I think to myself: Yes, no, and outside. Kid, where’s your mom? He is still looking at me. She’s in the living room. I get a box of penne out of the cabinet he cannot reach. That’s not spaghetti. You’re doing it wrong. I take two pieces and put them in my mouth, like fangs. Listen, you have to stick to the program. You don’t want to be a villian, do you?”

This moment is so very endearing in its own little way…I’m having a hard time explaining exactly what sort of personality I see within such a character. Playful. Unyielding, in a life-centered-around-self-experience sort-of-way but not negatively. In the moment, and yet drawing in the elsewhere…

And, the way he writes dialogue in his poems, I swear I’ve not experienced anything like it. I feel like an enlightened bewildered teacher in love. But what made you piece it together like that—why that there, and this here, and what made you think to combine three sentences into one. Or is this how you experience conversation naturally in the moment? In memory? And on and on and on.

“Why is it we believe we only have one soul? Because it’s easier to set a table for one. And you can sing your dinner tune to yourself while you eat over the sink. The throat of the sink: silent. The throat of the argument: more silverware, a tablecloth, more gratitude. A kid under a tablecloth insists he’s a ghost. A table underneath a tablecloth is, I guess, like the rest of us, only pretending to be invisible.”

It strikes me in this moment that I can put to words another thing I love and notice Siken does, drawing in the mundane, giving life to things unnoticed in a space that speaks less to personification, I think, than to a life. He aknowledges objects like the table here, and the relationship to the tablecloth, and more…but it’s not in a way we think of personification in the active object, but rather…one of presence and relevance to a story as much as the body of another person. No, there’s another way I’m hoping to say it I haven’t said here.

“The house had been burning for six years.”

The way he pushes and pulls and twists expectations with how single lines might end.

“The body: I’m insulted by the physicality of it.”

The way he puts relatability of experience into words. Facinating words. Complexity behind them always. And enough room to get it wrong.

“The robot is also not alive, but not alive in a different way. The robot is an empty box. He feels nothing. The ghost is a feeling without a body. The man is a heart in a trash can.”

Observation, inward thoughts, poems like daydreaming. It’s impossible not to feel all sorts of ways while reading his poems, and often shifting ways that never feel the exact same way upon returning, like having found the same poem upon waking every morning with a profound sense of deja vu but none of the memory.

“But let us leave the question suspended for a moment and enter a secret room behind the laundromat. What is the real problem? So much is so terribly, terribly wrong. There’s a fire. Set down the chicken and pick up the fox and drop off the fox and go get the chicken. It’s exhausting, keeping your eye on the chicken. There’s a fire, there’s a fire. Leave the chicken, leave Alamogordo. Where is your friend? Why are you sad? Let it rain, let it pour. Hallelujah.”