Contributor’s Marginalia: David O’Connell responding to John Gallaher’s poem “The Difficult Countryside”

The verve is largely the point, right? From the opening lines, the speaker’s tone is loose in its joints, attractive in its nonchalance, full of stranger-in-a-bar disclosure:

I talk more to trees and mice than I let on. Flies too.
And cars. Actually, I’m a regular chatterbox
to what doesn’t respond.

This staggered confession—one fragment tacked to another—is humorous, if also tinged with melancholy. It carries traits of O’Hara on his lunch hour or the opening of Schuyler’s “The Morning of the Poem”: the breezy shorthand, the self-correction. And if the wonderful absurdity of this list (descending in an odd taxonomy from trees to flies to cars) doesn’t bring a smile, that “Actually” in the second line wins us over, inspiring confidence that this is a speaker intent on disclosing the truth.

This charisma has a purpose. It ensures we’re on board before the speaker plunges us into deeper waters, admitting that chatting to what “doesn’t respond” enables him to “understand prayer.” Is this a deadpan punchline? A wry observation? It’s conspicuous that the speaker doesn’t claim to actually pray, just that he understands the impulse. What’s clear is that whatever deity he might/could pray to is being added to that list of unresponsive trees, mice, flies, and cars—a move which, existentially speaking, raises the stakes.

I won’t attempt to continue this line-by-line reading of the poem here, but want to point to some of the ways the tensions begun in these opening lines ratchet up as we proceed. Take, for example, the relationship of form and content. For a poem that revels in associative leaps, it’s quite controlled—even uniform—in its construction. Just look at those seven-line stanzas placidly stacked in four tidy blocks. Yes, the speaker’s attention may race from the occasional artfulness of streets to the ethical repercussions of dreams to phantasmagoric grandmothers (more on this later) to the country at large (more on this, too), but those wanderings are, to repurpose the poem’s own language, given “good framing” by the stanzas. In fact, these stanzas deftly control the pace of the poem. Note how the space after line seven creates a comic beat that makes the speaker’s “Not really” of line eight land that much harder. Read the poem aloud to appreciate how the enjambment between the remaining stanzas at once tempers and augments the poem’s rapid transitions between observations, questions, and, eventually, epiphanies (“I’ve never been this happy before”).

This speed of thought, of course, finds its parallel throughout the poem in travel. From early on, we’re literally taken for a ride. The movement of the speaker through the world (leaving “a little cloud / of dust”) is matched by his interior dialogue (the “debate” with his “third eye” about the ramifications of dreams) that occupies much of the second stanza. And then, speeding along, two lines into the third stanza, we’re somewhere else entirely:

All the grandmothers, as one, are banging apple pies
Against their kitchen windows, wanting out of our flashbacks.

Maybe my favorite moment. And, at the same time, … what? This is not one grandmother. This is “all” of them. In unison. “Banging” their all-American “apple pies” against the prison-like kitchen windows in protest. Every grandmother. We picture it. It’s a complete surprise because there’s been no warning. We were pulled by the speaker into a scene informed, maybe, by Ray Bradbury or Stephen King, but also utterly, fantastically original. Only after we’ve left those irate senior citizens behind—and how quickly we do, never looking back—do we read the suggestion of an explanation: “playing music makes everything a movie.”

But let’s not leave this minor horror without first recognizing how the speaker has co-opted us. We’re told that all these nannas, bubbies, and abuelas are furious that they’re being roped into “our flashbacks.” And this isn’t the first time we’ve been included in the speaker’s musings. A line before, (notably at the center of the poem) the speaker asks, “Aren’t we all injured by our art?” “What we?” we might ask ourselves. When did we become a part of this? We must conclude that either the poem is being spoken to a single unidentified reader or that we—like the trees, mice, flies, and now, by the third stanza, cows—are to be counted among those the speaker can address precisely because we can’t respond. The poem, after all, is yet another one-way form of address.

When we do leave the pie-spattered windows behind, we’re back to the seemingly mundane “corner of University Drive // and Sixteenth Street” (and note that deft leap between stanzas). We’re seemingly on safe ground, rapidly approaching the finish. There is even a hedged sunset to ride off into (“The sun is mostly down”). However, read too quickly, and we may just miss how odd those last lines are, how they don’t let us off the hook but drive us back to the beginning.

                                                             Summer’s
Listening, but only to an ’80s playlist, so we’re safe.
Why isn’t everyone doing this? America! What?
I don’t know. But it feels great out here. The trees say hi.

There are so many unusual things happening here in quick succession. First, the season is implied to be a sinister character, placated by the music but clearly dangerous. That’s so unexpected we may wonder if we are on “S I X / T E E N T H” street or back in a movie/dream. “Yes” may be the disquieting answer.

And then things get really disorienting. The speaker calls out “America,” (and, we realize, may have been addressing America all along … think back to those apple pies) and that’s followed by the one-word question: “What?” “Exactly,” we think: “What?” Has the speaker replied to himself? Or does “America” (unlike the trees, mice, cars, cows, readers, deities) respond? Before we can answer that for ourselves, the speaker complicates things further by reporting that the trees—the very trees that were unresponsive in stanza one—are suddenly saying “hi,” greeting the world, making friendly overtures. What are we to make of this? Is the speaker untrustworthy? Is he making a flippant joke? Or has there been some transformation between the first and last line that has altered the speaker’s relationship with the world?

What we know is that the speaker, at the end of the poem, is reveling in how “great” it feels “out here” in “The Difficult Countryside.” But do we really know where we are at this point? Yes … and no. That’s a good thing: this is disorientation created with intent. Moreover, it’s fun. I can’t say that enough. No matter what aspect of the poem we are discussing (and there’s still “Marfa” and the “subtle clue” and so much more), it can never be separated from this overriding, charismatic voice that carries us through time and (I’d highly recommend) again.