Contributor’s Marginalia: Steven Winn responding to “Egging” and “Ode to Tissue” by Adam Tavel

He snagged me, had me at the first line.

A sidearm lob would splat the oozy crack

In pristine pentameter, Adam Tavel sets the senses whirling in “Egging,” his choice memory sonnet on the exhilarating teenage rite—and empowering right—of throwing eggs at strangers’ cars at night.

How wonderfully, loosely slingy that first phrase is. It’s not some blunt overhand bullet the speaker recalls, but the carefully considered loft of a “sidearm lob”—more tennis player’s art than testosterone-fueled mischief. We can see the primal white projectile hanging in mid-parabolic flight, its soft curves burnished by suburban streetlight. The boy, no doubt unconsciously, has sent something essentially feminine aloft. Stay tuned: he’ll feel the transforming female touch before we’re through.

As soon as he’s got his egg up there, Tavel both speeds up and toys with time, giving us both the impact (“splat”) and the slyly reversed chronology of what happens next. Instead of the egg splitting open and spilling its sticky contents, the latter comes first in that “oozy crack.”

Once he’s stuck his slightly surprise landing, the poet knows just what to do with it. The crack that ends the first line is something the speaker and his comrade(s) “craved” in “creeping moonlight” in the second line. The rough (and gentle) music of those “cr” sounds will get a hauntingly voiced last chord in the sonnet’s final line.

Tavel can ravish with an image that sings a deliciously slimy melody. The “runny yolks appeared / to glaze like giant honeyed snails down trunks / of sleeping neighbors’ cars.” Like everything in this lush but tightly-wrought poem, the language delights and moves in multiple, reinforcing ways. The yolks don’t merely glaze their targets, but “glaze down” in kinetic slow motion. The “trunks” of cars invoke trees, a forest, a realm of secrets and shadows, menace and allure and beasts both enticing and alarming—those “giant honeyed snails.”

“Snips and snails / And puppy-dogs’ tails,” as the nursery rhyme goes, are “what little boys are made of.” Boys they may still be, these egg-tossing teens, but they are also coming into their power and potency as young men, who, when a porch light switches on to threaten detection by an awakened victim, can “floor the night.” It’s another deft turn, a pedal-to-the-metal car escape that also spreads out the vast floor of night itself, the field of serious play that “Egging” is, among other things, about.

At the end of line 8, Tavel begins to give the fun its deeper tint. Like criminals assembling their arsenal and covering their tracks, the friends would “hit three stores to buy a dozen each” for a night’s ample egging. They’ve even got an alibi for potentially suspicious clerks: Their “weary mothers” had sent them out, they’d say, “too wrecked / from nursing shifts to plan Sunday breakfast.”

It’s a lie, the speaker admits, and also a kind of double transgression against mothers and hard-working nurses. To his credit, he quickly owns it: “The lie was mine.” The crime is followed immediately by a confession. And then we get this further self-scrutiny in the poem’s expansive closing lines:

                              In truth I loved it more
than soaring orbs at cars, how one clerk blessed
my teenage heart while creasing my receipt.

We’ve come a long way from the adrenaline rush of an oozy crack and glaze of honeyed snails. Now, as if he’s seeing himself and his actions in clarifying retrospect, the speaker is distanced from “soaring orbs at cars.” The lyrical phrase affirms it. Looking back, he sees that arc that we, as readers did, from the start, the orb, like a young life itself, rising and flying off into the unknown, over the floor of night.

The boy is doing what we try and often fail to do when we grow up: he’s trying to comprehend himself honestly and fully. That’s the “right” I mentioned at the top of this essay—the hard-won right of self-definition and self-understanding.

Finally there’s the act of grace delivered, with sweet irony, from one of those store clerks the boys might have tried to dupe. It’s an unforeseen reward, the way she—and surely this clerk is female—blesses his teenage heart, sealing it like a private message to him by creasing his receipt. There, with the aural payoff of the “cr” sounds that launched the poem—the crack they craved in creeping moonlight—“Egging” circles back on itself. No, it ovals back, like eggs—sturdy and fragile, perfectly made vessels of potential life.

The risk of examining a poem’s many shiny threads is losing the weave in the process. “Egging” ripples from beginning to end, sound and sense knitted together.

There is one last thread I have to pluck. The poem bears a dedication line: for Chris Bell. It’s hard not to think that he was the poet’s partner, one of them at least, in petty crime. If so, like the clerk’s folded receipt, “Egging” is a fond message to an old friend, a memory recollected, confided and transformed into art. The blessing is ours: we get to listen in and share this intimate connection.

*

Adam Tavel. The euphonious name was new to me when I encountered his work on facing pages in 32 Poems 18:1. His “Ode to Tissue,” opposite “Egging,” is a rangy bravura feat spun out on the literally thin matter of its subject. “O little sail,” it apostrophizes, “how quickly you become / a pocket’s wad or rumpled cloud inside / the corner of a purse.”

Once again Tavel mobilizes language with an imagery so fresh (“rumpled cloud”) you want to pause and admire it like a painting. There’s much from where that came from: a tear-stained tissue is crushed to waste, “an intimate embarrassment.” Nervous new lovers, “panting in the glow,” grab for a box to handle an elegantly understated “aftermath of love.”

While “Ode to Tissue” is no mock-heroic of this type, there’s something of Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” in its elevation of a modest and mundane object. But instead of inflating into absurdity, Tavel’s poems takes on the mottled shades of parenthood—a “boy who’s trapped / inside the body of a man” and a father who conceals a dead baby wren inside a the directly addressed tissue—“To spare my sons I mummied it in you.” Funny and forlorn, celebratory and elegiac, “Ode to Tissue” is every bit as nimble and resonant as “Egging.”

An online Tavel hunt produces plenty of treasure. The author of four books (a fifth, Sum Ledger, is forthcoming in 2021), he seems capable of almost anything. There are nature poems, poems on historical subjects, odes, elegies, poems about religion, music, Halloween.

I took particular, personal pleasure in “The Walmart Sparrows.” An ecstatic, unpunctuated riff on the “cavernous shrieks” of birds and “puffy-eyed pre-work shoppers,” it’s dedicated to Bill Knott, a poet I happened to be reading at the time with great pleasure and admiration.

Knowing that Tavel liked Knott, I liked them both all the more, valued the compressed language and capacious poetic universe they share. Affinities abound, inside and out of Adam Tavel’s verse. I’m grateful that “Egging” egged me on to discover them.