The general arc of the book The Long Invisible: poems by Michael Dechane (Wildhouse Publishing, 2024) moves from break up to new relationship. From opening pages there is an ache. “Because I love Twice at Once” (p.10) within insomnia “I come to this window/naked, where winter pours in./Here is a tang my skin remembers.” The poem moves to the conclusion with a stunning ending which I hope might outlive author and book “my body remembers
how ardor is the thing with horns.”
This slope and rise of the book is the opposite of many collections where the arc is from happy to imploding relationship, or from only comprising the down cycle of relationship. That default trope makes a certain sense since people when entering trauma are inspired to process grief as poetry. The Long Invisible takes a more Happily Ever After bent, perhaps following from the adage, if it isn’t a happy ending, it isn’t the end yet. (It is a narrator’s call wherever you decide to call cut.)
The net effect of the poems are heartening. At the root of the poems is a person looking for beauty and meaning.
Admittedly I have been among the scoffers when poetry is described with the overused term “luminescent”, but this collection has a quality of light like Mary Pratt, rooted in the every day mundane miracle of being alive. It is undeniably gorgeous, fiercely present.
A yellow tomato comes apart at the seam
my knife makes. This skin: how can it hold
so well so much? I salt the weeping flesh
that reflects this morning light.p.37 “The Gathered Made Ready.”
Despite this poem being an allegory for hope of heavenly healing of the broken, it is lovely, dwelling in the exquisite now. There can be a different world view and yet the poetry crosses the chasm.
Sometimes I want to see the prose memoir background that would anchor transports of ache, duede, joy. For example p 11’s “The Black Bear”
piques interest and shows such freshness of framing: the absence of someone refusing to come home as a bear is sumptuous in its extended metaphor. an absence as a danger or not a danger, but an awareness watched in the daffodils at dusk “like a greater darkness, claiming candles.”
It is beautiful in sound, concept, structure, imagery, metaphor. There is a holiness embedded and imbued that is painterly and admirable and suspect. What was left out? what would the bear say? In practical terms, what is omitted with this perfect beauty?
I don’t tend to hang about in the lyrical streams of poetry partly because of the plaintive and bald, explicit and uninsured, a reliance on expected but the predictable and oversimplified is not in abundance here.
There is not a self-satisfied air. The poet questions himself “Why Am I Kinder to Your Memory” p. 16 and muses “Why am I kinder to your memory
than I was to you?” and on p. 57 “Seventh- grade story” the concrete is recounted play-by-okay but finds a lesson after decades. A gilded, gentle humour of distance is extended to the more foolish past self. It is poetry by a mature mind. This poem leads to the self-examination and quiet eureka of insight: “how necessary it is/to wreck the sentimental. When it crumples, finally,/the real story, the hiding life, is free to emerge.”
In this poem the case was smelling poop & realizing it was coming from your own shoe on the school bus so [spoiler alert] chucking the one shoe out the window and walking home half-shod. That gently comic situation suggests an allegory anyone can apply to themselves of being the one at fault while blaming others.
The poet seems to be taking stock of the first phases of life. Ihe poet takes another long view, standing apart from the show in,
“I don’t hate them, but it’s as if I’m a co-producer
in the longest running show of human history.
I’m tired of watching us be so bad to one another,
making sure I hear nothing, keeping
my mouth shut to save a tip, save this job”“Round After Round” (p. 59)
Even inside the tired jadedness here, there’s a sort of pleasure and acceptance, whether portraying drunken hookups develop, watching a terrible cook try to cook. The most romantic poem was indulging in a night swim when “The warm slicks of our bodies found each other.” (p.79).
Many writers don’t want to stray towards beauty, or only permitting it if paired one foot is securely on pathos. Is this collection using heart strings percussively? He is putting himself humbly & vulnerably out there, concreretely, openly.
If there were a summary it might be encapsulated in the idea of happiness as rebellion, as reveillon, as the best revenge as in this pasty of “Spring Dictation” (p. 96)
“Do not exhaust yourselves
in the grip of little things.Be candent roving flames
who savor the darkening world.May beauty confront you”
