You Think You Are Something
after Wendy Xu
just because you put on some new pants. You could
have put on a coyote all whiskery and yippy.
Instead, please put some sunlight on a forest.
Then put on all of the coyotes. Run as fast as you can.
While you run, listen to the scritch beneath
all your terrible little claws. Put on a deluge
of grasshoppers pinging off a metal roof. Put on how
you should feel desolate after this. Put on heartbreak.
Put on a therapist and a rom-com movie for dealing
with desperation. Just say No! to depression. Kiss
your anxiety. You are big and hawk around on large
wings. Put on a robe. You are still a coyote, a forest,
and a grasshopper. Put on coyote song. Fly over the forest,
a culvert, and a meadow howling. Put on a halo, chaos,
and misadventure. Think of what else you might put on.
Put on nighttime, starlight, and satellites. Put on Venus,
Mars, and Saturn. They shine so brightly your eyes hurt.
Put on hope and the blindfold of forgetfulness. Put on
how you want to go home. Put on memory and prayer.
Put on the earth and see it spinning. Put on a face
and look at a mirror. Please.
______________
Dale Champlin
Review by Nancy Christopherson
This poem’s marvelous details grab me from first striking move to last reflection. Evocative imagery, so fresh and startling, lucid and bright, allows me to see all the way out beyond myself; I am flung out there by Champlin’s poetic spells…. invited to put on a coyote, all whiskery and yippy. Who would have guessed? I think, let me engage my little claws and hear them as they scritch. So much fun! I want to try these on as my mind responds, Yes, give me grasshoppers pinging off metal roofs! I hadn’t thought of the sound of small insect hail before. I want to be big and hawk around on large wings for a change (great move from noun to verb here). Such an invitation! Champlin’s prodigious imagination compels the reader beyond her own self, an experiment! Then entices her back to look. Look in the mirror! See, you are transformed. Most often a poem transforms the speaker. Here, the reader is transformed. This is the highest destination for poetry. The reader comes away changed for a moment. Witness the sheer magic of language manipulated by a true master of the art.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) (from Walt Whitman, Song of Myself)
The re-search within the fiction of possible identities we fulfil, continues its pursuit in this poem. Without regret, bitterness, or shame. Unapologetic. A lucid odyssey, a role-play, one of a million possible paths, magical, personal, universal. A handful of samples demonstrating what the mind can invent and claim as ‘self’. The phantom limb of our identity does what it does best, it shape-shifts. And I’ve just realized I’m not even interested in asking the obvious question: why. At this point, it truly doesn’t matter.