Your Eyes Are the Color of a Lightbulb Floating in the Potomac River
Just when it is time to say goodbye
I think I am finally understanding the lightbulb
but not milk or NAFTA or for that matter paper money
let’s not get into my stove top coffeemaker
I don’t even get how this book is fastened or why that orchid
seems happier or at least its petals a little whiter
when it is placed right up against the window
or how certain invisible particles
leave the wall and enter the cord and somehow make
the radio make the air become
Moonlight Sonata or Neighborhood #3
basically a lamp is a mechanism
to shove too many electrons into a coil
or filament a lightbulb i.e. a vacuum surrounds
the first filament was made in 1802 out of platinum
as soon as it was made to turn deep untouchable orange
the air took the electrons away
which left it charred like a tiny bonfire
just like ones we have all seen when we squint and hold
the glass bulb that no longer emits
soft white light when we flip the switch
I wonder if my fear this morning sitting in the dark
and listening to music is anything like
the inventor of the telephone growing deaf
and knowing all those poles and wires
were starting to cover the land and someday everyone
would be able to get exactly what they want
–Matthew Zapruder
I spend a lot of my time wondering how things work: relationships, unemployment, the economy, computers, poems. What makes a person decide to marry one person after dating everyone else? How do little pieces of plastic and metal convey zeros and ones–and better yet–how does that translate into the words you see on your screen or the photographs we take? Do we all see the same thing? And poems: how do you write one without trying so hard? How can it be so simple and so hard to write poems instead of prose? I have spent my whole life asking questions in order to understand better, and when I don’t understand, asking again. Sometimes I still don’t understand.
I don’t understand why I’ve spent the last two years unemployed and underemployed, or what I’ve done wrong with my life, in this economy. I’ll never understand why my father was stupid enough to grow 32 marijuana plants in his house as a retired cop, or who turned him in. Even after my parents divorced and I remembered all of the girlfriends my father introduced me to when I was a child and finally understood all of his addictions, this was the last thing, the last vestige of my childhood middle class identity falling away. I don’t understand why my aunt pointed her gun at my head on Christmas Day two and a half years ago; for months afterwards, I couldn’t think of anything but holding a similar Smith and Wesson 9mm. I held a 9mm Smith and Wesson in a gun shop because I needed to understand what my aunt was thinking, even though she said it was unloaded. I wrote about it. I still don’t understand. I suppose I accept these facts without understanding them.
It’s been hard to hold onto this sense of wonder as an adult, though, hard to feel optimistic even when I don’t understand. Poetry helps. I don’t understand everything about this poem, like why the lines of this poem are double spaced in Matthew Zapruder’s new poetry collection (Sun Bear, Copper Canyon Press 2014), or why the speaker starts to understand the lightbulb (“your eyes” from the title) “Just when it is time to say goodbye”–but he does not understand everything else. Relationships still seem like the biggest mystery to me. And yet I like this poem for the parts I don’t understand, because it does not over-explain, and somehow I know what Matthew Zapruder means anyway.
Mostly, I love that the last lines of this poem reference the telephone and remind me of an essay by Eula Biss called “Time and Distance Overcome” (in Notes from No Man’s Land, Graywolf Press 2009). She writes of Alexander Graham Bell in the second and third paragraph of the essay:
Bell’s financial backers asked him not to work on his new
invention because it seemed too dubious an investment. The
idea on which the telephone depended–the idea that every
home in the country could be connected by a vast network of
wires suspended from poles set an average of one hundred feet
apart–seemed far more unlikely than the idea that the human
voice could be transmitted through a wire.
Even now it is an impossible idea, that we are all connected, all
of us.
I would like to think you understand what I’m saying, because I do believe we are–all of us–connected.
-R
