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Not to arrive, not ever to know
how to arrive or how to live
even here on Utopia Parkway in Queens.
This is for the Soap Bubble Sets and the Sun Boxes
and for time that moves like a silent film
through a projector.

"Hotel Imperium" By Rachel Loden University of Georgia Press, 64 pages "Ocean Avenue" By Malena Morling New Issue Press, 75 pages

Mörling's own work has a sensibility similar to Cornell's famous boxes; like those unclassifiable works, her poems are also suspended in time, filled with the objects of her private vision of the world. They're somehow insular and universal all at once. She feels tiny at certain moments, separate from the cosmos to the point where she's able to write lines like:

In the shape of a human body
I am visiting the earth;
the trees visit
in the shapes of trees.
Standing between the onions
and the dandelions
near the ailanthus and the bus stop.

But unlike Cornell, Mörling is acutely aware of and constantly examining her molasses-like progress through the world. "I don't live more thoroughly/inside the mucilage of my own skull/than outside of it." Her eyes are wide open, in other words, and she wants to know what she's doing here and just why she experiences time and space in such a maddeningly conscious way.

The result of this psychological quest is that "Ocean Avenue" is filled with journeys: the author on a train that

... departs at dusk from New York the neon signs begin to bleed their letters the light goes into buildings that pass like so much else that I notice and forget and don't notice and remember.

Or the author on her way to the train station, admonishing herself

Walk slowly now.
It doesn't matter if you miss
the train, it doesn't matter
if you miss all the trains.

Or the author envisioning the larger journey of her life in terms that are vast and simple all at once:

On the earth
and in the universe that does not end,
that has never had an end
and no center either,
I am here in my room breathing.

There's a certain hazy magic in Mörling's work that has the power to make obvious truths marvelously complicated. In a poem called "Like Tile" she records one such experience:

The "29" on the awning
has lost its meaning

and become pure
form. Nothing
exists the way
it appears to;
the memory
of a room changes
as you enter it.

It's like reading Kant; as we move through the world, are we seeing things in themselves, or merely appearances of those things informed by our own experience? And in the end, does it really matter?

After reading "Ocean Avenue," one tends to think not. The book is so steeped in a heady enjoyment of the here and now that it makes you want to go sit in a field somewhere, or at least on a park bench, and ponder your own role in the universe. On top of that, it has a wonderful matter-of-factness that tempers its dreamy languor, so that a poem with the almost ecclesiastical title "In This World" begins:

You may think nothing of it,
but in this world there is no
health insurance coverage
for the dead,

but there are retirement plans
for those who are not yet born --

And though we are registered
in the Offices of Vital Statistics
we still ask the questions:
"Where do we come from?
Who are we?
Where are we going?"

Whatever the answers turn out to be, Mörling knows one thing for certain, and she passes it on generously. "What will you bring with you when you die?" she asks in the book's title poem.

Not your name.
Not your body.
Not a single photo.
Not a single flower.

The list goes on,
but what's the use?

We all know we can't bring a single thing
and that is what in the end makes this world
what it is.

So go out and get it, while you can.
salon.com | Feb. 11, 2000

Melanie Rehak's column on poetry runs every month, alternating on Fridays with Ann Hodgman on cookbooks, Polly Shulman on science fiction and fantasy and Jacqueline Carey on mysteries.

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