Disheveling the Solid Air of a Love Act is All We Can Do

A Review of Justin Wymer’s Deed 

“The raining down of cold razors is / part of my persuasion” was the first line that struck me in Justin Wymer’s Deed.  I have always been a lover of abstract, nefarious confessions and, coupled with wonderfully unsettling slant rhyme, the line grew on me like algae, became a part of my own demeanor. The couplet is a microcosm of Wymer’s larger poetics, full of contradictions: lushness and sterility, pain and pleasure, and the indifference and seduction of nature. Deed’s invasive species is ars poetica, and it succeeds in creating an ecosystem of language that binds the reader to the harshness and serenity of the natural world. 

Wymer’s persuasiveness lies in the work’s edge-combing, its razing of neat systems into biting tableaux: 

If I could stay here long enough in this
scissoring skrim of mist, I would understand
flensing. I would tell everyone all the words for
bare that I ignore…

Deed by Justin Wymer. Elixer Press, 2019. 120 pages. $17.

In “Angle of Fog,” the word “here” operates as both the location in the poem and the poem itself. It speaks to the delicacy of language as a phenomenon and at the same time grounds us firmly in the earth. The conditions of these lines are such that I believe in a symbiosis between stamina and dissection—that to remain in place is to be shorn, that, given duration, even mist could tear one apart. But who, exactly, are we talking about when we talk about “one,” the “I” in this poem—a body? A mind? A voice? What particular constitution is susceptible to this flensing? Sonically, I can hear the shearing of a voice in that “scissoring skrim…mist…flensing,” and syntactically too, a flickery static infiltrates the mind. I think in Deed, when we’re talking about an “I,” we’re talking about the constitution-less constituent—the soul. This shearing is less an act of violence, and more a laying bare, an unveiling. Still, the speaker resists (ignores) this vulnerability. What would it mean for a soul to be laid bare? Or a soul to resist being laid bare? There is a transcendent wildness that I respect in this gesture of resistance. By remaining elusive while making restrained declarations (“terror’s frivolous if known / but minds its progeny”), what the reader beholds is an encounter with the speaker’s deep site of interiority, but behind glass. 

Privacy is currency for this speaker, and teasing this privacy is addictive, like gambling. In poetry, there is something extravagant about pointing to a privacy that transcends communicability, yet it’s not a fault, per se, of language. Wymer’s poem “An Absence Needs Very Few Attendants” is essentially an anthem to this notion, declaring that “Injuries are / always complete” and, with more candor than this speaker typically allows, 

I can honestly say I know what it feels like
to have lain claim to but smothered a seraph
that lay crouching inside me before it leapt out into
a shining coil of syllables.

We’re either privy to the prior execution of an angel’s speech, or reading it. This is a productive tension, and I like to infer the dangerous power of these apocryphal ones who are only hinted at ever-so-briefly. The pointing to that-which-cannot-be-named is what Wittgenstein would call mysticism, and poetry is the acrobatics we make language perform in order to point to it in as many ways as we can. The poems of DEED are “firmly in charge of [their] own disorder,” and “holding one scorched wing with the other wing, the wind not letting up.” As readers of poetry, I believe we all have some attraction to disorder, because in it lies the presence of revelation—the thing torn open, we can see how it malfunctions. Disorder, too, contains the pretense of healing, which never exists in a unified landscape. Wymer predominantly uses enjambment to suture otherwise tourniquet-ed sentences. Never is such a turn a trick, but rather a subversion of expectation, which, I believe, is what gives the work a somewhat erotic quality. To me, the constant conversation beneath the text, between unit of sentence and unit of line, creates a secondary tone, a pain-pleasure discord in every poem. It’s cyclical, and the work believes in repetitions: seasons, weather, life and rot, healing and not. 

One of the reasons I’m so attracted to this work is the neutrality with which the speaker confronts decay. In the poem “Viniculum,” Wymer’s speaker operates a Tarkovskian movement of aperture over an ecosystem rife with decay: “…the jay, it’s beak / bloodblue,” “cicadas cantalating / through husks,” “the flood / smearing the outlines of the stand of trees” and even the speaker’s own “fovea dent in [his] left shin filled…and bronzed-still.” We are not viewers of an ecosystem—we are part of one. And, as one of the cycles that Wymer revolves through and outside of, we are subject to its static-laden blurring, its erosion due to the elements and time. This could be perceived emotionally, but Wymer’s approach here is solely imagistic, at a remove. There’s a narrative scopophilia at play here, the dissection of the shin from the rest of the living body, that, as a distancing technique, calls solely for examination and meditation, not hyperventilation. Yet, to me, it seems that processing the emotion associated with cyclical decay and rebirth isn’t at issue here, but rather that acknowledgement and witness of natural forces is simply enough. “Fishes’ eyes, watering” is not meant to connote tears, as it might in the work of another poet. Here, it’s just a simple fact of aquatic life. By the end of “Viniculum,” Wymer’s speaker experiences a “quick cold preemption of— / attrition, knowledge of the cliff before / the cliff.” Enjambment here is the agency to manipulate time, to temper and slow it, and yet, Wymer’s speaker follows the natural flow, allowing the natural attrition, the natural jutting edge of the cliff, to synchronize with nature’s agenda. It reveals the possibility that language is not what sets us apart from nature, or even a way to make nature meaningful or dignified, but an integral part of the ecosystem itself.

It is too easy to say that Wymer’s poetry evidences his “love for language.” Rather, Wymer inhabits language as a complex ecosystem, an ecosystem that he sustains and is sustained by, a forager of language, a respirator of language. There is, without a doubt, tenderness for the possibilities that his language-play opens up. Maintaining this tenderness is difficult. It is the same as the predicament for those who live in gorgeous environments—the sea, the mountains, canyons, etc. With repeated daily exposure to beauty, by living in phenomena, one becomes incorporated; it ceases to revel. Wymer’s landscape is language, yes, but it is language with tufts of fur that snarl and teeth that truly puncture. His ability to see it with fresh eyes at every page-turn, even every break of the line, offers tremendous pleasure and surprise for the reader. “And so / the sudden remains / only as an answer.” Deed offers us what no bitter pill, no self-care regimen can. It is a plunge into cold water, an invigorating shock to the system that makes us fully present, as both complex minds and animal bodies, where the tongue is the oracle arbiter, accessible to all.