Be ready for thresholds, light and dark—in both natural and fluorescent hues—and for getting high.
Open Albert Mobilio’s latest poetry collection touch wood and please go directly to the table of contents. Read down the list of provocative, engaging titles and turn the page until you reach “Rounding Off to the Nearest Zero,” the last poem in Mobilio’s fourth book. You’ll see that the collection literally starts here, in the front matter, as his titles not only reflect the taut, lucid poems that follow but also give the reader a sense of the illuminating, liminal space they will be entering through his work:
CONTENTS
Touch Wood
The Whole of It Is Winged
Average Reader
Conditional Tense
Decline, Falling
Circuit Breaks
Provision
This Pretty Pledge
Social Struggle
Far as Mine Goes
We Hold Our Heads High
Swing Music
What the Great Ones Do
Homage to an Available Landscape
Guest Lecture
Despite Which Slid
This small glimpse of titles portends what we discover throughout his collection: poems shifting effortlessly from that which is grounded “pillar then pedestal” and “lincoln logs” and “a cabin / with its curl of smoke” (“Touch Wood”)—leaping to “the whole of it is winged, this science / of speaking about large things / in pocket-size” (“The Whole of it is Winged”) while amidst earth and air, the persistent theme of mortality, playing with what is life, or rather, life-like: “Come on, that skull is perceptibly fake” (“Circuit Breaks”). The irony, humor and somewhat informal manner in this last line run parallel to the stylized, more formal and abstract qualities inherent in Mobilio’s work.
And this is just a hint of the profuse array of ideas in touch wood. Be ready for thresholds, light and dark—in both natural and fluorescent hues—and for getting high. To borrow a part of Mobilio’s line from “jade)” in his compelling abecedary “Letters from Mayhem:” “I kid you not the rush is good.”
It’s a recurring rush throughout these carefully crafted poems, with a palpable tension that heightens the senses and sensitivity as Mobilio juxtaposes shorter poems with two extended sequences, “The Spelled-Out Spark in Rooms” and “Letters from Mayhem;” then at the end of the collection, touch wood abruptly changes forms, closing with a longer prose poem. You can be caught unawares, as his work changes form, subject and length, all of it interwoven with a rich consonance and assonance. These heightened qualities and variations only deepen the reader’s pleasure, as in “Despite Which Slid:”
the wrong way of thinking
is always about the right one, just about to shift
over killing this by killing that & why
shoulder such happenstance,each of us flat against the glass, the glass against
this cartesian forest in which we play
the stranger overlydelighted by our strangeness; you endure this
scrutiny, mind-netted—they watch me, too,
like a boss who enjoyshis lawnchair: go sail, I’m told, but my agility is
insufficient, no easy perch in some
bird-slung latitude soit’s really only ground covered, the ticking down
of want, that dumbfuck courage
needed to overflow a mile
Watching and being watched are integral parts of touch wood—a close examination of both the self and the other. “Social Struggle” opens: “Commandment / breaker, look at you:”. This bold, first stanza provides an entrance into the compact, well-wrought lines to follow. “Far as Mine Goes” begins with the line: “My night watch: night watches me,” in which the speaker (and reader) are at once distant and close-up. This economy of words, often a feature of Mobilio’s work, intensifies the tension and beauty of the poem.
The typography on the page plays an essential role in the collection’s composition: from the structured, masterful couplets and tercets that constitute the majority of the collection—including the two longer sequences—to the more airy and open lines of “I First Read,” a poem for Gustaf Sobin, a homage in so many ways with the final two stunning stanzas:
I first read this body’s breath is fed by living
song, which we hear as an inward
tending part of speech even as it presses
out against the farthest trees
and blue-streaked ridge
where mind sheds sound as if its words can reachthis body’s breath I read is made of air, unbroken air
The lyricism intrinsic here, in the last shorter poem before the sequence “The Spelled-Out Spark in Rooms,” is sustained and transformed in the nine-section ekphrastic sequence:
. . . even the gods / open windows for want of a breeze) : glare (section II).
These nine poems are an homage to Dan Flavin, the late minimalist installation artist and sculptor who created works made of fluorescent lights and fixtures. Mobilio’s sequence is a declension of light and dark composed almost entirely of couplets, with images ranging from “kinds of dark—the blue-black of casual doom” in the opening poem to “sunlight’s inelastic speed” (section III) to “a television’s stuttered glow” (section VI) to “A sparkling disco ball” (section VII) to “Fluorescent detonation a your feet” in the final section—all this just a glance into Mobilio’s by turns darkened and illuminated rooms.
With the final poem “Rounding Off to the Nearest Zero,” the reader finds themselves in another singular, unexpected place: the passenger’s seat next to the speaker in a rented car “mid-size, with electric adjustable seats,” on the way to a funeral that “turned out to be a convenient time for that sort of thing.” Here is a change in shape, a story recounted in a looser and more conversational tone, not without an underlying sense of humor, where an unnamed woman acknowledges that “It was a good death, . . . and I [the speaker] compounded this fortune by judging it to have occurred at a good time, at least for me.”
And it’s a good time for the reader too, a good time to be transported to a new place and space from where we sit in a rented car seat close beside the speaker, with their final reflection: “I cracked the window enough to hear that tearing sound you hear in a fast-moving car. I would be getting there, I concluded, with time to spare, one way or another.”
