Contributor’s Marginalia: Chad Abushanab on “New Town” by David Yezzi

Like much of David Yezzi’s work, “New Town” has a subtle narrative arc and plunges us into the lives of its characters as it exposes a particular moment in time. In this case, a boy and his mother move to a new town. The father has stayed behind. The boy spends his day adjusting to a new place, a new climate, a new school. His mother takes appointments until the late evening, so the boy eats dinner alone (but for the cat). He plays video games until his mother comes home. She lies down, still clothed, and drifts off to sleep. But the true drama, as with any great poem, is in the careful casting of the details. In particular, I’m interested in Yezzi’s treatment of light. In “New Town,” light acts to reveal a complex narrative behind the presented drama, effectively giving shape to the things we cannot see, as they were not explicitly written.

The poem begins with the storm-light. Not quite lightning, it would seem, but something constant and looming. What my mother used to call “heat lightning” on days when the humidity was high and a constant roll of thunder and yellow-green glow filled the sky. It sets a mood of disruption, destabilization, a storm caught on the cusp of happening. For the narrative of “New Town,” the storm-light provides a tumultuous subtext to the given details, revealing more about the things that happen outside of the moment of the poem. Because it’s the first image we encounter, it causes us to consider the context or genesis of the boy’s move. We can connect the mood of this light to the fact that “his father’s still living in the other town,” ostensibly where such light isn’t as ubiquitous. In my mind, this hints at some kind of disruptive impetus for the move—a separation or divorce. Note, too, that the boy’s mother has to work extra hours, possibly to support the both of them as a newly single parent. The mood cast by the storm light carries us through the rest of the poem.

Moving forward, we can’t help but see the over-exposing glare of fluorescent lights inherent to the classroom image introduced in the second stanza (can anyone who’s been in a high school in the last 40 years shake that?). Light is, essentially, the agent that makes all things visible. And yet, in the classroom, the boy seems to disappear as he “stands without a desk,” barely an entity. When the other students turn to face him, it’s as if he doesn’t exist—they “see” nothing—before they “look away” and “don’t turn back.” This is arguably the most well-lit moment in the poem (though a direct reference to light is curiously missing), and yet it’s where the boy feels the least present, the least “seen.”

Stanza four has the boy returning home from school. Because so much of the poem is tied to the passage of time—the events that occur on the page happen in less than a day—we can assume a dynamic change of light. It’s afternoon now, approaching dinnertime. We can imagine the darkness coming on, the corners of the house filling with shadows, perhaps the dim light of the microwave providing little relief. It’s a reflection of the boy’s disposition: dispirited and angry. The world continues to darken despite what he says or does—or, in this case, what he doesn’t say and doesn’t do. His situation—his transplant to a strange new town—is outside of his control, just as the growing darkness is out of his control.

After the boy’s lonely dinner, his mother returns after nightfall to find him playing video games. It’s past 8 in the evening, and from outside the darkness intensifies the light of the TV pouring out of the picture window. His mother sees him—as do we—at his most exposed in this light. It’s an image of isolation in the face of overwhelming opposition. It is, I think, the feeling of being a kid and having your life decided for you rather than by you. He feels backed into a corner and he lashes out with an “indiscriminate spray” of virtual bullets at “anything that moves.” We read this “anything that moves” reactionary mindset back into the relationship with his mother, with whom, conspicuously, we never see the boy directly interact. Does he blame her for his new life in the new town?

And perhaps this is what she thinks about in the moments before she’s thrown into sleep by exhaustion. She’s lying in bed, tired from what we know to be a long day, unable to even change her clothes. We can imagine her rolling the question over and over in her mind: what will become of the relationship between my son and me? And we, the readers, are left with one last instance of light—the porch light—which shines on the “bare trees” and the “rusty sumac,” to provide some kind of answer. We know from this image that it is late autumn—the leaves having fallen off the trees and the vines becoming brittle. We know, too, that winter is on the way, and beyond that, spring. We project this progression onto the boy and his mother. He will grow colder before he finds warmth. There will be more darkness before there is light.