Contributor’s Marginalia: Austen Leah Rose responding to Grady Chambers’ “Thursdays”

Certain poems have a superpower: they can slow down time. In reading Grady Chambers’ poem “Thursdays,” time becomes thick and syrupy. Try reading it out loud. Notice how the world around you begins to blur. Allow yourself to feel the hollow weight of an evening spent drinking, to move at a pace no faster or slower than a bus ride across a river.

We aren’t given much information, but we can infer that something has happened to the narrator’s relationship with an other. A decision has been made. “She” can no longer be found in the rooms where she could once be found. On Thursdays, these two people, who once lived together, exist like negatively charged electrons, flung apart, with the force field of the city between them.

“We agreed it would be Thursdays, / and it became Thursdays.” Chambers writes. This simple sentence might be one of my favorite opening lines, ever. The tone is almost biblical; we are our own gods creating arbitrary yet seemingly inevitable universes. “I knew what I knew,” Chambers writes; the tautology is a knot pulled tight at the center of the poem.

The poem moves quietly toward a revelation: “I grew a kind of confidence. I took my time / in the bathroom mirror to adjust my hat.” The line break is a hint. This poem is about the time it takes to be touched by the world, to confront truth, and “adjust.” The narrator in Chambers’ poem is not seeking answers; he is merely staying awake to witness the morphing colors of a new reality.

I happen to be a fan of Chambers’ work, and his book of poems, North American Stadiums. He’s writing in the tradition of James Wright, a poet who could unveil the sublime in everyday Midwestern American life. Grady does this too when he writes, “each week I’d slump / into the same blue seat, / each week the same views, / though they consoled me: the city through the window, / black and gold.”