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Rational Numbers, by H. L. Hix. Truman State University Press, 2000.
Winner of the 2000 T.S. Eliot Prize

    Certain longer poems work by a process of accumulation. From "The Song Of Songs" to The Dream Songs, Wordsworth, and The Wasteland, poets have piled up segments and pieces in a kind of accretion that becomes more than the sum of its parts.
   
     Rational Numbers, by H. L. Hix contains two such long poems, titled "Orders of Magnitude," and "Figures." Both contain great beauty and sharp insights. It's not always a tidy process-it often seems scattershot-like a series of notebook poems-like fragments of a lost and original template--until the end when it all comes together, when the weight of Hix's writing is finally and fully felt to be more than the weight of any individual section.
   
     "Orders of Magnitude" is comprised of 100 "decimals," each decimal being a 10-line poem, each line containing 10 syllables. In all, 10,000 syllables, give or take. (I don't know how many syllables there are in "Figures," a much shorter work). "Orders of Magnitude" starts out like this: "Here begins the work of darkness in which / I've been encrypted these ten pent terms past," and ends, 9,957 or so syllables later, "already my digits / number my days with painful rigidity. / I have not said what I wanted to say." In between are moments of clarity, beauty, confusion, wonder, and sadness. There are confessions and delights. There are colors and explosions and developments. Dana Gioia, who awarded Hix the 2000 T.S. Eliot Prize, calls the book "ambitious, consummately achieved, and deeply unified." He also calls it deeply conceived and utterly achieved. He describes the book as having intensity, depth, and sheer intelligence. I don't know about all that, but the poem is, you could say, kaleidoscopic.
   
     Jorge Luis Borges has a story about a mysterious object called an aleph, which turns out to be a single point connecting all other points of the universe. That's what "Orders of Magnitude" reminds me of. You can see numerous facets of life at a glance. The poem contains a sort of transcendental spiritual world-view: "Voices of geese in the yellow night sky. / If it meant something other than itself / their song would sound less like God. If they meant / something less than God, the geese would not sing."
   
     This reminded me of the conclusion to Umberto Ecco's book The Name Of The Rose. The young monk Adso, asking his learned master a startling question, dares, "for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: 'But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primigenial chaos? Isn't affirming God's absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?'" In other words, either God does everything because He can, through the geese that fly and the fish that swim, or God can do everything but does nothing, and it's pretty much the same either way. The goose honks as it flies, and plucks grass, and excretes, and it means God. Characters come and go, live and die in "Orders of Magnitude," all meaning God. They experience, and thus the reader experiences, the chaos of the world, especially of human life, which when gathered all together still somehow makes meaning. The meaning of the world is God. Meanwhile we find the rainbow, the comic, the dramatic, and other expected absurdities of life.
       
        A yellow square revealed by scratching off
        a black wash, the neighbor's kitchen window
        frames an eggshell blue vase and her housecoat
        the color of clover. A violent violet
        sprayed across the sky presages thunder.
        Through strict obedience to light, color
        enjoys considerable liberty:
        next day the same blue will spread horizon
        to horizon the fragrance Ariel
        inhaled in the new and limitless world.


        . . .
        questions burn like ice. Is there a god? No.
        Was there once a god? No. Will god crush you
        as he crushed your father and your father's
        father? Yes. With secret pleasure? No, with
        plainly visible pleasure. . . .

        . . .
        The thought of death is my dancing partner,
        a fine one. She laughs too much, but we whirl,
        I a fallen leaf, she the wind. Stars swirl,
        a mirrored ball, such fiery tesserae.
        . . .

        . . .
        I subscribe to neither species nor sex.
        . . .

    If that last line is true, and this is a poem about all of life at once, then what in the poem can ever be strictly personal? And if nothing is personal, how can we attach our hopes to characters and care what happens to them? The romance, the sex, old age and illness could happen to anyone, and therefore to no one in particular. They're important, but abstract. If that's the paradox of God and the world, of everything and nothing, it's also the paradox of the poem. You can say everything you know, about everyone you know or can invent, and say a whole lot, and make it as personal as you can, and still ultimately not say what you wanted to say. It's a different kind of poem. It's a world-view.

    "Figures" is very different, being a doomed conversation between two lovers parting. I think it's beautiful. I also think it alternates remarkably between vacuous and repetitive language, and ordinary but haunting language, and denser, imagistic language, and by the end, packs the same kind of accumulated wallop. It moves from style to style, dialogue to monologue, from:
        Father never told me I made sense, but his was the kind of not telling
        that meant not to say everything it did not say, not the kind of not telling
        like your and mother's that means to say what it does not.
        Who am I making sense to? No one makes sense to me. . . .

to:

        I will be late this evening. Go ahead and have supper without me.   
        I will not be here when you get home, whenever that is.
        I have a lot of things to finish up here, things that have to get done.
        I will leave a note telling you in general terms where I have gone.
        There are things to finish up there, too, I know, but these are easier.
        It will be nowhere you have heard of or would ever want to go.
           
to:

        I don't think I love you like I used to.
        After he had tightened the knot on his tie
        and shrugged his jacket back on,
        after he had opened the door,
        he said he would not be back.
        I don't think I love you like I used to.
        A planet strays from orbit,
        A human child is born blind.
        A star explodes into color invisible to our eyes.
        I don't think I love you like I used to.
        Wind longs for heaven, leaves long for earth:
        their courtship is exciting but brief.
        I don't think I love you.

    This poetry has the special beauty and realism of life itself. It's not light or predictable, or easily quantifiable. It is whimsical and deeply penetrating, and worth the effort it takes to read it. It's written with a special voice, the halting speech of doomed love; for a lover; for the world.
       

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