Then the poem returns to the telephone conversation, to the phone booth itself, and we’re addressed as a sort of witness:
You are listening. Light crumples like wax, a cruel weight kneeling among the azaleas. Dark wings gather in the trees beyond the phone booth, notes spill from their oiled throats. The rain is slow and steady, a color you already know.
Yes, we know the color, and we’ve seen the man bleeding across the hood of a police car. Our narrator has carefully documented a scene that is, sadly, all too common.
These poems transfix us with their gaze. What they show us is—whether beautiful or uncomfortable—awe-inspiring. There’s a reverence to this work. Billboards and cherry blossoms are treated with equal attention; desire recognizes itself and is abandoned in the same poem. In “Traction” two figures set out to free a car from a snow bank. The speaker confesses,
Heading into dark, bundled beyond good sense, we’re going to try this and fail. Shoulder to shoulder is progress, but eventually we tire. Eventually your mouth suggests Put away the shovels and leave the car in the ditch for a while. Implies: The house is full of whiskey and kung fu movies. Or: There is nowhere else to go.
As if in response to this final inference, the speaker frees herself from the situation, explaining, “Nowhere on a canceled Friday can be too far to walk. I’ll take my words and slant through a disappeared city. Let’s see if the streets burn this white, this impossible all the way home.” She turns toward possibility, to a place she will traverse even—perhaps especially—if that means leaving the other person behind. The shoulder-to-shoulder actors of this poem quickly separate into “you” and “I,” and readers follow the “I,” the speaker, into the unseen horizon.
If One of Us Should Fall draws us in, captivates us with its music, and invites us to watch as longing takes shape across various landscapes. In “...whichever direction we cast our gaze—/space we cannot fill, space we cannot leave,” we are there with the poet, immersed in song.