Contributor’s Marginalia: Richard Foerster responding to Morri Creech’s “Bedtime Metaphysics”

Much of my pleasure from reading and rereading Morri Creech’s “Bedtime Metaphysics” came from trying to pin down precisely (or even imprecisely) the tenor—that is, the underlying subject—of the metaphors he weaves for us so beautifully. As his speaker says, it is “wily and full of shadows.” A major clue, of course, is right there in the title, metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that deals with the fundamental nature of reality. What could be more wily and full of shadows than the abstract concepts metaphysicians explore: being and knowing, causation, time, and space?

In the first ten lines, Creech’s near breathless outflowing of sensory images with its fraying syntax (which ends so rightly on an ellipsis) plunges us into an “unsolvable night,” a “depth of cold,” an expanse of “frostbitten grass” until we find ourselves “beneath the magnitude and chaos of the dark.” Are we meant to feel a shudder of existential dread? I suspect so, but also delight, as we imagine the ethereal “whoever” dragging the hem of a “nightgown of wind” across the grass. (Byron’s “She walks in beauty, like the night” comes to mind.) And we feel awe, too, as we gaze up toward “some // cosmic alp” and the “stars like snowflakes.” There is no stasis here; all is flux. Is the nightgown of wind, say, the Milky Way? I’m reminded of the closing lines of Gary Snyder’s “Burning the Small Dead” as the smoke from the burning branches leads the eye upward toward “Deneb, Altair / windy fire.” And here is Snyder again: Poetry is “a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics” (“Burning: No. 13”). In other words, poetry gives us surer footing as we attempt an ascent up the “cosmic alp” of reality.

An exquisite, unexpected shift comes at the start of the fourth stanza, when the speaker seems to lose his mental footing and stumble in his effort to define the unsolvable via metaphor. Yet in his unstitching, in his “raveling back,” he stitches together yet another metaphor, that of a tailor poised to begin again “to thread the hour / into figure.” There’s so much (pardon me for saying) sewn up in lines 7–10: the allusion to the nightgown’s dragging hem in the poem’s first line (which will return at the end); the dissolving of the speaker’s bedtime musings into sleep and a needed respite from the “reconciliations of metaphor”; the original glimmer of inspiration awaiting the next day’s needle/pen to rework the garment/poem that has come unstitched. Am I mistaken to detect a pun here—for stich, i.e., “a line of verse”—and a nod to the tailor/poet’s determination to try again to make it right?

The ellipsis at the end of line 10 brings the syntactical thread of the poem’s first half to a close with a decisive snip, after which I sense a shift in tone and formal strategy, a stripping away of metaphor in exchange for a series of straightforward declarations until the poem’s last line.

It seems precisely right that Creech uses the impersonal pronoun “one” at the start of line 11 rather than “I.” There’s something clinical and self-distancing about it, suggesting a scientist’s awareness of the observer effect—that an act of observation can alter what is being observed. The speaker’s gaze is still out into the universe—toward its shimmer, combustion, and confusion of shapes—to constellate its apparent randomness into meaning, to fix it somehow in the mind. Lines 15–16 acknowledge the near futility of that quest:

The tenor is wily and full of shadows, sister.
It can’t quite be compared before it changes

I love the sudden direct address of “sister,” which I doubt is meant to address anyone in particular, certainly not me. Rather, it punctuates the line like a fortissimo passage in a musical score. And that qualifying “quite” is essential: Poetry with its metaphors may never attain the summit of reality’s cosmic alp, but it is the daily quest for meaning, howsoever unfixed and transitory it remains, that matters.

The enjambment from “changes” into the next couplet achieves another volta, a diminuendo of sorts, as the speaker recognizes that “everything”—all reality—is subject to entropy, a decline into disorder: time itself, say, and the “honest stars,” which must inevitably blink out. But in the last line, Creech returns us to the reconciliations of metaphor with the ritornello of the frayed nightgown, bringing his meditative lyric to an appropriate close. We are back in the here and now of the poem’s opening moments, at bedtime, where the one who “always puzzles” is looking beyond the maples, and I’m there too, puzzling at what lies before me in the guise of “a frayed nightgown.” A spectral gust of wind across frostbitten grass? The Milky Way’s streaming lights across the sky overhead? A soul leaving its earthly body for the “emptiness of air”?

Gladly, I’m left there to dwell in Possibility –