Ink Monkey: Poems

It's been a long while since I've felt the need to put my usual reading to the side and seek out a book of poetry. Not to study, not to consume, not to finish as quickly as possible and incorporate into a big writing project, but rather to linger with, to read a little each day, for no particular purpose. My choice fell randomly on INK MONKEY, no doubt drawn by the title, which suggests that all of us, readers and writers, are "ink monkeys." Opening the slim and very elegant volume, I saw five sections listed: "Twice, Oasis, False Starts, Jellyfish Suite, Japanese Prints." No apparent relation between them. Good. The first poem, "Sleeves," drew me into an ethereal state of mind in which the spirit floats over life's experiences making uncommon connections. To explain, forgive me, I must summarize the poem. "Sleeves" speaks of a man of the West who has something up his sleeve as he leans on a wall and watches a woman walk by with a starched French cuff. The Muse of poetry leans also, but toward the East, where love is traditionally portrayed with loose kimono sleeves, wrists bared. The poetess herself has visited that country and lain with her lover "sleeved in bodies" which are so light they are nearly lifted by the wind. Even in my prosaic retelling you can see the beauty of Diana Hartog's method: the fluid transformation of an image into something else, making connections that link the mutual experiences of first, second and third persons over the continents and the ages--all with a sleeve! The poem "Hieroglyphics" is more elaborate, but just as successfully takes us back to the ancient Nile. What the four poems in this section have to do with "Twice," I don't know. Maybe poetic reincarnation? I kept reading. "Oasis" devotes thirteen poems to the American West. Having lived in California, I was particularly moved by "The Moon and Firestone," in which the moon looks down on the Hollywood Freeway, its clots of traffic and all the junk, but also on the desert, and on Palm Springs, a car dealership, wrecking yards and canyons filled with round tires. The moon is "smudged with cigarette butts," yet seems interested in our affairs. The poem captures perfectly the balmy southern Californian night, when you look above the trash and the crime and strangely feel a spiritual uplift. "False Start" begins with a note that the "ink monkey," once thought extinct, has been rediscovered in China. The clever primate was once used to prepare inks for writers, and it slept in the desk drawer. A portrait of such an uncanny beast follows. Only three poems in this section, perhaps because the tour de force of the book follows: "Jellyfish Suite." I will not try to retell, recount or describe the way the blobs of the sea transform into a whole globe of life: skins, membranes, brains, jellies, embryoes, being and nothingness, the "sting of beauty." It's so good that poetry, philosophy and religion merge into one and shift back and forth in the sea. The last section