M.W. Jaeggle, Wrack Line

 

LETTER TO A FRIEND
CONCERNING ANOTHER’SWHEREABOUTS

He’s at that cabin on theCariboo plateau,
that one he’s alwaysyapping about,
washing chipped bowlswith lake water,
careful not to getneedle-thin bones stuck in the drain.
He keeps the big red gatelocked, the chintz curtains closed.
The garden, long gone tothistle, is home
to his eggshells, burntbarley, soup dregs.
Nothing can stop him frommundane pleasures,
catching rainbow troutonly to release them,
noon-warm tea with Kundera,a few laughs
from Diefenbaker onvinyl.
He’s in the cabin at theend of Antoine Lake Road,
counting cracks in thefoundation, where the rooms
are parting ways. He’s inthat tin-roof tinderbox,
cataloguing birds,flowers, stones,
watching Bogart movies,
reconciling Clapton with Buddhism.
If you were to ask him ifit gets lonely
in the hush of the cabin,he’d say
he’s distracted easily.

I’veknown his name for a while now (through seeing copies of his three published chapbooks),so was curious to see a copy of Wrack Line (Regina SK: University ofRegina Press, 2023), the full-length debut by Vancouver-born Buffalo, New York poet M.W. Jaeggle. Wrack Line is a collection of carved lyrics exploringand examining form, from prose blocks to sonnets to more open forms of thelyric. Jaeggle works through first-person lyric narratives to articulate grief,loss and distraction, writing out the distances and the distances between, asthe piece “POEM BY FRIDGE LIGHT” offers: “Here I am in the culvert where wefound a car’s die mirror. / Here I am in the fields of horsetails, / in the blackberrywith stained fingers. // Here, there’s no wristwatch on a nightstand, / just amind kidding around / someplace unaware it’s unawake. // If I look up at thecanopy now, the day’s / a shredded rag. If I close my eyes, / the light is honeycombed.”There is an intriguing way that Jaeggle works through form through an extensivereading list—examining and echoing form through the masters, as one does—and thepoems offer an array of literary models, from cited poets Denise Levertov and PhyllisWebb to Paul Blackburn and Wang Wei, as well as hints of poets such as JohnNewlove, perhaps. His lines are solid, offering precise rhythms on memory andland, although it is the two-part opening prose poem, “AUTUMN, ACCORDING TO CHILDHOOD,”where the lyric of his line really shines, a sparkle and rush that rise above andbeyond the precise specifics of his line-breaks, as the first poem opens: “Yourmother whispers your name, draws your eyes away from the / loon threadingwater, tight stitch. Look, she says. Look: there’s a deer / chewing dandelion,right here in the yard. Knees bending, she slowly / breaks distance.” Eitherway, there are some stunning moments and movements across Jaeggle’s WrackLine; I am very curious to see where he might go next.

POEM IN THE MANNER OF WANGWEI

Each time on awell-marked and auspicious day, waiting,
a metic again in some newplace,

the thought of yououtside the terminal sharpens,
a narrow band of silveron a lake come midnight,

then, far away, there atthe baggage carousel,
hawthorn beside fir andcottonwood, you short person you.