"Love, if true, is tacit."

Alice Fulton, "Nugget and Dust"

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I want to eat Alice Fulton's poems.

Sometimes I want to just eat them for the sumptuous repast and sensuousness they lay on the lips.

“Triptych for a Topological Heart” is so rich—it’s like a triple layer cake. Here’s how she ends the first layer…with a feast of vowels, a roll of o’s and a’s:

Without ardor
theory suffers. That’s why I’m stuck on you with wanton glue, per-
severing, styling something blobbish and macabre
into something pointed, neat. Love is a gift
that springs from an unlit spot. Resin and rue.
Even when I’m in the dark I’m in the dark with you.

*

Speaking of the dark—and the dark You—my notebooks hold the past for me against the fear of forgetting.

I know that in November 2014, I woke up twice with the same nightmare: P telling kids they could live with him in Virginia. I don't remember the scene, but the notebook says I asked him if it was true. Half asleep, he said that was a month ago. A pre-emptive strike when he wasn't sure how I felt.

I know: the clouds weigh too much today. Planes coming. The fear of terror, itself, is a terrorism and constant. The color of my eyes: cumulus.

I remember this was around the time I was doing a tremendous amount of free labor for a local old-blood Southerner who kept spreadsheets of who owned property and had money in Tuscaloosa. I don't remember thinking: Posture is a pose that suits the clothes. We select based on what we plan to feel, perform. Anything on Sunday might turn opera. Baroque, rococo, harmony requires this overwhelming aesthetic of fake. But if I look at my poems, I can see the baroque brought to the page suggesting a sort of gaudy conflict and turmoil, a deep, ongoing fear of being blacklisted by Southern elite.

“Without ardor, theory suffers.” Uncertainty—the enemy of ardor and theory—is the heart of poetry. The mouth is torn between these modes.

*

Fulton tells us the trees “don’t suffer openly,” and then pivots into details. And the way she uses neologisms, the way she sprinkles anachronisms over the top of a skyscraper, as in “Orientation in Hades”:

Heaven's that blotto yonder,
under digits of sun.
Light always has a point to make
in kingdom come, as in religious pictures
or Disney-animation. That paradise

looks like a salt mine
may come as a surprise.

The use of "blotto" to defamiliarize and then suddenly turn the wheel into what may be paradise is brilliant.

Free will comes down to meaning
we can eat anything with the hot sauce on it.

Our banter, in contrast, clanks
like cashboxes slamming closed.

And "the lamentation of the damned"—what does that sound like?

"The Body Opulent" trafficks in alliterations and sensual imagery. Fulton mixes religious words with mechanical ones, see "polychromed partitions", that raise the stakes and situate the body in a time of space of particular sanctity.

Particular sanctity. What does that mean? What is sacred now that wasn't sacred ten years ago? I think of privacy and how sacred it is in the States compared to Romania, where extended families still share houses after getting married. I think about how this relation to an abstraction changes our notions of right, wrong, intimacy.

Each cell got busy, singing
the dawnsong of its name.

What is a dawnsong? What is an aubade at the cellular level? What does it sound like if every cell has one? Fulton's jumbling of science and religious ritual is so evocative and strange and perfect here. 

Let's see how she ends the poem:

The freeway's glowing
dot and dash, a path of crumbs to follow home. 

And how she ends “Barely Composted”:

They say a trader can protect herself
with scales or acid.
They say it makes a nice death mask.
Tears won't change it.
Is that not great?
Why then do I scruple
to entirely embrace it?
It is too precious
for small transactions
and too heavy
for large ones.
It has nothing to prove.
Paper is its substitute.

I keep thinking there is no substutite which doesn’t become an icon.

Maybe Christianity is religion of the incarnation where God writes themselves with the world they created to unify it and bring it closer.