In the first poem of Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff, Robert Thomas’s fourth book and third collection of poetry, we meet Jack, who writes “the music music would make for itself, if it had his hands.” Jack is a mesmerizing talent and upstages the speaker at every turn while he tries to celebrate the birthday of his beloved:
Jack sets your house on fire, then sprawls with you
on wet grass till the heat hits the flash point,
your eyes widen, everything widens and
I am white thread lost in the night’s wide eye.
Jack is a phenomenon that transcends character, embellished by the speaker’s awareness of potential loss, betrayal, one’s own precariousness before the estimations and choices of the beloved. The poem’s tone morphs from jealous hyperbole to a moment in which these feelings, fully witnessed in their exaggerations, are allowed to blaze their own form of self-transcendence. The elegant image of observed self-erasure in the final line shows a parallel movement within the speaker, who simultaneously experiences a sense of invisibility in the absence of attachment and perceives himself in this state. The poem itself constitutes this “wide eye” that contains the fantasies harbored by the speaker’s ego, facilitating the reconnection of their underlying fears with his conscious perspective.
The sonnets that follow likewise present moments of consciousness meeting itself, as well as the beloved, in more nuanced ways, organically building a worldview from the inside out as they progress. In so doing, they transform and move beyond the inherited sonnet themes of jealousy and wounded love alongside those of romantic comfort and immortalizing art. This collection is a subtle body of work with fine psychological material. The poems all are titled with two things that appear in the body, but rarely decisively, more like the way that the recollection of a dream tends to be “about” the most prominent things we remember when writing it down or retelling it. The analogy can extend to the ongoing attempts to form coherences amid the disorientations and realignments of the fantasy elements of love as they clash with reality. Fittingly, the titled objects are usually asymmetrical, their relationships impossible to conceptualize, perhaps a subtle mirroring of the ways – sometimes seemingly cyclic, others epiphanic or quiescent – in which the two lovers continually rediscover both self, beloved and relationship in the poems.
The poems explore both introspectively and interpersonally, each qualifying, fascinating and provoking the other. “Sonnet with Mozart and Bear,” concludes with a dialogical scene with implications for the wonderous world earlier called forth by Jack:
“Sometimes I just want a man who does things,”
you say. Maybe I should kill a grizzly,
fuck the Thou out of your whiz kid’s sublime
I-Thou. Jazz like that. When I say, “I do
things too,” a silence falls. Scarlet embers
of a thousand angels flare and perish.
Here the comic overstatement maintains its defensive role; however, its juxtaposition with dialogue qualifies both, even creating a foundation for the two to begin to inform one another. The quoted charge is so general it would be hard to imagine the speaker fully guilty, and yet the generality leaves plenty of room for it to be true in some way it can’t or won’t bother to articulate. Importantly, both the speaker’s sarcastic interior response and verbalized rebuttal respond to the premise of his failure, avoiding discussion of what is actually bothering him as well. In this context, the line break after “I do” causes it to ring like a second vow, or perhaps the shadow of the original vow, this one to hold one’s own space within a relationship. One reading of the poem might conclude that the “angels perish” in the final line due to the speaker’s disabuse and implied besting of the “whiz kid;” the angelic “[s]carlet embers” do seem to echo Jack’s divine arson, perhaps here finally flamed out. However, the fact that there are two people experiencing very different versions of their shared world in the preceding argument also reminds us that we don’t know whose angels these are. Perhaps they are – or were – even shared.
The subsequent poems indicate, however, that the angels’ passing from the story is more a necessary adjustment of perspective than celestial tragedy. “Sonnet with Quartz and Rice” displays one of the collection’s nuanced arrivals of layered insight into the circulations of the human psyche catalyzed by romantic love:
The two-edged sword of being human and
knowing it: blades of grass never compare
themselves to an oak or look in mirrors.
I never love you more than when I watch
you look at your reflection and relish
what you see. Only a human would do
something so dirty and shrewd and divine.
When you touch me you turn me into rose
quartz clouds, into the shadow of a hawk
passing over car hoods in a gravel
parking lot, into a tired old woman
jaywalking, carrying under her arm
a bag of rice. To be loved, to be human,
is to be, not turned on, but into.
The jagged line break separating “being human” and “knowing it” emphasizes the separation between the actively experiencing and ruminative modes of the psyche. The comparison to non-sentient “blades of grass” is then introduced by a colon, which conjoins the opening thought, mimetically a fragment, with a complete sentence about the unconscious grass, a clever way of evoking the distinct yet inextricable modes of consciousness. In a parallel movement, the colon presents a shift from “being human” in the singular sense to one version of the plural: comparison with other humans.
The intricate scene in which the speaker watches the beloved’s mirror gazing then complicates the separation between being and reflection. The narcissistic cliché of the beloved at the mirror is retouched by the speaker’s affirmation, which praises her self-love specifically for its all-too-human aspects – and perhaps implicitly for the mirror of his own self-love it offers. The divided human figure sketched in the poem’s opening looks at the beloved from its own shadow of self-interest, and, counterintuitively, discovers within the light that casts such shadows, his own ability to offer a love that is both quiet and profound.
Yet another fascinating turn follows the phrase “When you touch me,” in which the speaker’s connection with the beloved is presented in a litany of identifications. Romantic connection, as a relative, ephemeral form of self-transcendence, is delicately represented by the way the line breaks across this sentence separate compound nouns and phrases, creating sudden worlds within the lines that stand out within the broader descending movement from the “rose / quartz clouds” down through the hawk to its shadow in the parking lot where the old woman trudges along. The descending imagery contrasts with the lift of the right branching syntax, the poetic gesture mirroring the lover’s in its elevated, deeply felt praise of life in temporary defiance of gravitational inevitability.
The penultimate line break places the entire self-conflicting conundrum, “To be loved, to be human,” within that old woman’s bag of rice, a clever mutation of the previous sequence of conjugations back into infinitives. This newly consolidated conceptual awareness sublates the modes of experience previously explored in the poem to its paradoxical definition of human duality as open-ended, objectless transformation. It couldn’t, after all, be otherwise, much of the psyche lying outside one’s assumed boundaries, in the interpersonal realm we, as seen above, often presume populated by our competition. The poem teaches us that our predicament of self-division can also be conceived as a fluidity, thought and feeling always in the process of reincorporating one another – or always together as present potentials, wave and particle, figure and ground. Once again, within the poem’s stable container, we glimpse into the movements of psyche through that psyche itself, which may provide another window into the choice of a formal poetic structure for the sequence.
The collection explores a considerable range of tones and approaches to these intricacies, even extending into the prospective stars themselves as in “Sonnet with Swan and Long Tall Sally”: “What if creatures in other galaxies / have a vague sense that something is missing, / but don’t know it’s Little Richard, Shakespeare.” Yet, on one level, even this can read as another mirror of our own alien relationship with the selves we perceive, as when the speaker of “Sonnet with Ribs and Obelisk” coyly opens, “I wasn’t stalking you.” The comic aspect has shifted here to a more subtle irony, facilitating the exploration of a memory’s psychological implications. This qualified comic tone prepares a different kind of meditation, an example of the fine, varied work in recombining elements of poetic craft across the poems. This poem concludes with another mirroring scene with equally remarkable implications: “It wasn’t about him. It was the sun / beholding you. You saw that you were good / the way light is good: by definition.” The greater sequence makes good, as well, in allowing all of love’s shadows into the frame, the jealousies, fears, and eventualities often foregrounded, the love itself what remains when the forebodings have spoken their lines, depleted, departed.
The title poem’s acceptance of the sea’s containment of movements between love and fear, eventuality and compassion, includes perhaps the most enduring metaphor for the collection’s ambitions:
Death is cold, but that turbulent sea
can almost reach body temperature. I think,
my love, you love that boy who risks breaking
his graceful body into a million
brilliant scintillae. So I imagine –
rehearsing losing you. The night diver
raises two torches in his outstretched arms,
bundled sticks soaked in wax, sulfur, and lime
so their flames keep burning underwater.
In preparation for the final image of the diver, line breaks organize two distinct movements, the first connecting imagining and “brilliant scintillae,” the second “rehearsing losing you” with the introduction of the night diver, linking the speaker to the image even as it seems to inspire him as an outside influence. The imaginative rehearsal of loss acts as a homeopathic remedy for projections sparked by fears of inevitability, allowing a wrapping of both love and imagining within the awareness of each as psychic factors, as the torches’ fires are insulated from the water. This fire held by consciousness of fire’s life stands as the perhaps unanticipated realization of the experiences of enthrallment at Jack’s wonders and the subsequent extinguishing of angelic infernos – even the meticulous observation of consciousness in and as the world in “Sonnet with Quartz and Rice.” Concurrently, the image of the torches lighting features of the depths serves as the composite sonnets’ reflection, mirroring both their broader and individual movements and discoveries in the psyche. Indeed, a considerable contribution of these poems is their continual presentation of consciousness experiencing the act of self-reflection – until it yields transpersonal insight within which to protect love from the world, the unconscious, and one’s own orbits and evolutions, that love itself may aid in exploring all of these more deeply.
[Published by Carnegie Mellon University Press on February 21, 2023, 96 pages, $15.95, paperback]