Looking in thru a poem: Borson's Nebraska

Ah, to read and be silenced.
I’m reading Roo Borson’s Intent, or the Weight of the World, (M&S, 1989) and for the 6th time in 70 pages I hit a full stop. Communicative perfection.
Call it a poem, a prose poem, a thought, but each word stands and can’t be removed. I’m a rank amateur at life, all my words kludges.
Each element adds up to the whole in Nebraska. Each sentence is braced against the next. It’s got the feeling of a tumble of thoughts and yet coheres. There’s an economy of words and emotional movement that does not feel contrived for a reader. Yet it is storytelling that works with knowledge of how a reader understands.
There’s a control in the meter and the rate of unfolding. Each thing proceeds in an almost offhanded way yet the poem is built on making irrelevant things, unrelated elements point to a point yet unseen. It’s as if the poet runs a magnet under the iron filings with the last line to change the alignment of what came before. Roo Borson wrote Nebraska which reads in entirety:

How many hundreds of miles until it feels like standing still — and yet at the motel the sense of motion never ceases. The room with its crude painting over the bed, suffused, like an icon, with the glances of countless persons. One after another we move through this life, crowding the ones ahead of us. And how he curls around me, eyes closed, a hand on my breast. As though, the sum total of human knowledge were there, while we sleep.

The first sentence runs regular as breath, iambic and steady as the open road. The poem starts wide, introducing the size of movement, the landscape and the paradox of how travel feels like stillness. Our bodies don’t physically move. We are in our metal pod moving at usually a constant spacing from the other isolated pods on the highway. We don’t change direction nor momentum. The thing we see before our eyes is a dulling constancy. How ironic to come to place with foundations, what we call a constant address yet it is full of movement and change. There was movement that felt like stillness then stillness that feels like movement then the completed set of stillness that feels like stillness at the edge of sleep. It gives a satisfying closed loop yet doesn’t travel a predictable course.
Her eye for the particular is sharp. The comparison of crude paintings screwed into the wall over the headboard to religious painting remarks on the habit of how people orient themselves in a room, stand quietly upon arrival. The rituals we do unconsciously are not religious in nature but what is religion but a habit of sorting what to pay attention to?
Susan Sontag said, “Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”

The poem makes leaps that seem unrelated. Each sentence has a little disconnect but because it is structured as prose, everything that occurs is enjambed against the next which makes sense for the subject of go-go-go travel and the crash at some convenient place to sleep for the night. The sensation of travel is this way and yet her order of reveal is the sort of slow thought. The pacing is not harried nor cluttered and the word choice is considered. Even to say “countless persons” gives a distance. Each becomes distinct unlike if she had made them an aggregate of “countless travellers”.
The verb tense choice is interesting. As if it were there while we sleep. Yet the he in the poem is in a posture of sleep, is he asleep? Is she? Or they both ready themselves, entrust themselves to sleep and all its omniscience and answers. After a day of being one of the faceless many of travel, among the temporarily displaced travellers, making a nest in this uncertainty, there’s this specific and familiar and safety. The awareness that the only time the body may understand anything is when we are asleep and unaware. By time we wake we’ll have lost that again.
It ends on a sort of mixed note, hopeful and yet doomed to repeat the sort of daily life of partial knowledge. It’s a rich and complex and yet short and plainly stated. There are elements introduced such as icons and the speaker’s point of view expanded to include her being not alone but being held, that shift the poem, yet don’t feel out of place or like an oops, forgot, let me editorially add backstory. Being in a car each person is in their solitude even when travelling together. Being at a hotel has a kind of homelessness and separation and when spooned together there’s a shift in what is home and the tone of the world becomes warmer.
The poem moves from the large of horizon to the small of inside the hotel, where the regularity of meter hiccups, to inside the room, inside the bed, inside the head. Each sentence changes the context she builds. Travel. The ubiquitous motel-print made into something holy, the process of travel by its nature being a pilgrimage thru life. How the crowded procession of lives lose some, gain some continuously, a queue of pilgrims that you can’t see either end of. Then the particular of not the journey, not the act of stopping at a site, but the people in particular, a tight zoom in on the scene. It goes from an inverted pyramid then pivots back outwards to speculate on the nature of knowing, the solution to the problem of this journeying towards somewhere, reaching the destination of knowledge daily without knowing, without remembering we’ve arrived.
Somehow the poem comes together without feeling heavy-handed, without a gag reflex that something is being shoved down my throat. There’s something like narrative but it doesn’t feel like linear storytelling. There’s emotion but it doesn’t feel unaware and thrashing it its own emotion. Mood is left for the reader to add rather than little white tags attached to the stems of lines. There is a basic skepticism about what we know and an undermining of truths that makes me trust the like-mindedness, the compatibility of point of view without feeling that I am being told what I already knew. There’s something of a delicacy without a preciousness. There’s a touch of sacrilege without losing a respect with life in the same sticky brush. It hints at poetry as something lasting and essential without falling into poet as poet’s voice or poet authority of certain happy or certain sad endings. It dovetails and it’s got a humbleness to its offering somehow, a polish without being slippery. Device without neon arrows pointing out clever word-deviousness. It’s understated.
It feels like ideas considered and then a person taking another in confidence to say, I saw this and this. This suggests that. I’m here.