Contributor’s Marginalia: Randall Mann on “Scale” by Kathy Fagan

I have always been a massive fan of Kathy Fagan’s work; I love this subtle, disquieting poem. Just look at the first sentence: “At this point in our lives we expected to be more / satisfied with the lighting.” Indeed. I admire that “our,” presumptuous yet inclusive; she risks alienating her reader, yet there’s something universal about the anxiety of vanity—so it’s a welcome risk. Look at that line break: Fagan understands enjambment, how the expectation to be “more” floats there, dispiriting and bodiless, and then is undercut, enriched, and somehow grounded by the addition of the detail about the lighting. It’s an old joke, the longing to be lit well, but she allows me to see this idea in, well, an unsparing new light.

Fagan has an acute way of making a pronouncement then undercutting it almost immediately: she turns to “great music and the vast panorama” for consolation, but which she can only “apprehend in bits” (I love that that “apprehend” is slightly off to the side of what one might expect, “comprehend”; Fagan’s work is always sliding past convention); the violin “stitched something open in us,” yet in that opening, she feels not expanse but “the illusion of vista.” Scale is another word for complication in Fagan’s poem; almost no writing is good without attention to both of these, of which she’s a master. A master, too, of the good old-fashioned sensual image, the wineglasses in hand “smeared tulips,” the sea that drops ashore “its briny scent of beach wrack.”

Scale is very much about distancing, or removal, in “Scale,” as in the lovely way the sea is described as “imperceptibly / beyond,” another great line break; Fagan stacks abstraction on top abstraction and somehow makes the feeling all the more particular. I envy that. In the penultimate line, that scent of beach wrack is dropped “like keys on the dresser of a dark room,” and I can’t get this metaphor out of my head; I find it—like this poem—desolate, comforting, familiar, and haunting.