“5pm on the nose. They open their mouths
And it rolls out: high, shrill and metallic.”
Unusual for a poem, the opening line establishes the exact time the events described in the narrative begin. This opening is misleading because it seems to set the stage for a poem that is going to follow from this stripped-down anti-poetic beginning. It only takes another line for that to disappear altogether. The sound of screaming begins clearly enough with the description of a pitch so high it becomes shrill. Those are easy enough to describe, but metallic is a monkey wrench. Describing how a human voice can sound metallic is not an easy thing to do. This leap from the prosaic and mundane to a more difficult abstraction foreshadows how the rest of the poem will play out. The rest of the first stanza will continue with direct language firmly planted in the visceral tactile qualities of everyday life. By the end, the poem has leaped from the inarguable premise of the time of day the kids begin screaming to comparing them to the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey going half-mad over the mystery and meaning of the black monolith.
“Like Elijah. If this is it—if this is what
Their cries are cocked toward—let the sky
Pass from blue, to red, to molten gold”
The speaker has gone from coming up with various hypotheses to account for the children’s screaming to settling on the most unlikely: if they power enough volume in their cries, the entire apartment building will blast off like a rocket. The rocket will be a modern-day version of the chariot of fire that carried the biblical Elijah to heaven. The speaker, for reasons unknown, at this point settles on this as theory worth exploring. The imagery in this passage begins with biblical reference and ends with imagining the building as a rocket passing through the vivid hues of the atmosphere before finally reaching the black void of space. The identity of the speaker is never explained nor is any sort of backstory provided that explain this sudden turn toward an obsessive contemplation of heaven. This turn in the narrative is jarring and unexpected and another example of just how far away from its prosaic and detail-oriented beginnings it gets. The path has taken the speaker from the immediacy of being shocked by insanely loud screaming to wish fulfillment in hoping that somehow the noise is a precursor to a cosmic ride into forbidden knowledge.
“What teases us with blessings,
Bends us with grief.”
This philosophical observation is the closest the speaker ever gets to self-identification. Gender, age, ethnicity, economic status—none of these attributes are known. Indeed, little is known about the speaker except for living downstairs from the screaming kids, living next door to someone who likes onions and having a preference for random selections from a music collection. And then there is this which is almost a personal confession buried deep within a more objective contemplation of the place of humanity within the scheme of the universe. The speaker is for just a moment stripping bare the philosophical trappings and exposing a naked emotional dread. The possessions we take with the promise of making ourselves content are inevitably taken away, leaving an emptiness of no longer having them. The implication is that the contentment of possessorship is no substitute for the misery of losing them. The deeper implication is that these things which begin as a blessing and end up causing grief are hardly confined to material possessions. The imagery of the universe as a sweeping wind capable of clearing away every blessing and leaving only eternal grief seems to confirm this assumption. The subtext buried deeply within this passage is a dark one, hinting that heaven may be a conjuror’s trick designed to trade a mercilessly short period of blessings in exchange for a never-ending period of mourning for all that has been left behind.
