Jenny Grassl

Collaborating with Time

In everything turns on a delicate measure by Maureen Owen, poems effervesce, harnessing the power of bursts, stirred contexts and relationships—oracular, like carbonated tea leaves, stark with story, and swerved with titles that are not titles. We find ourselves among goddesses and sheet ghosts, a Pentecostal racehorse, and shoes pinned forlornly to a message. Here, language is not a shaping of chaos, but a revelation of what happens when you break apart the expected shapes of thought. This undoing of syntax and chronological structures may be seen as releasing the divine. In the deep history of humans, the idea exists—In the beginning was the word. Gods create and dismantle language. Enchantments are the unmaking of linguistic order, and writing and utterances have the power to change the world.

The known and the concrete appear to dissolve into the unknowable. A poem begins addressing a bony kneecap, and arrives at the sound of black holes colliding. However, how knowable is a kneecap to a person anyway? And how unknowable are the physics of an expanding universe to a physicist? The questions these poems bring us to ask lead into the mysteries of our own being.

Profoundly imagistic: visual, musical, haptic, olfactory, and visceral, Owen's poetry reaches a high meadow of lyricism, which might come as a surprise in such a raw experiment with language—raw in the sense of risk taking.

Let the bones talk!         chalky

& fluent     evicted from biology     riddled

& cranking          flannel and cotton  from coat hooks of shoulders

Born of a moment's flux, or a slowing of time, fragments of experience prevail. A logic that is not singularly chronological moves us to wonderment:

The night they were to meet / or had that night already passed.

A speaker of a poem says:

I made an error/ with time

With implying a collaboration.

In breaking apart language and time, space must be subject to the same process. GPS failure can deliver a lost person to the most miraculous accidental scenery, especially if you are Maureen Owen. Location in space is as entangled as location in time. Multiple layers create  a collage on top of a collage.

She had scrambled her directions and now she was rambling /

in an aura of replicas     she circled herself / like private moonlight  

on a beach     just passing through

The title everything turns on a delicate measure delivers an imbalance, a paradox. 'Everything' is the weight of all, and it 'turns on a delicate measure,' a great kinetic event dependent on a small amount of something, a precise quantity, or part of a musical score, cause and effect in the sense of ordinary or cosmic mechanics. Everything depends on, is caused and effected by—something fragile. This title resonates on many levels. I do not think only one meaning is at stake. The title cannot help but bring to mind the familiar image of the butterfly wing influencing weather. Catastrophic storms can in theory be caused by a mere flutter.

The title describes the fragility of the planet, a theme that haunts this book, without screaming.

The long poem in six parts, "What We Do," begins with an indictment of human 'result:'

our disregard      our hubris   our rhetoric   our abuse

Nature will do as instructed in error    obey our misguided

nonchalance / our refusal of cause and effect

The individual and collective human are brought into lesser focus against Nature's prerogative to evolve. Section II brings us squarely into disaster, with vivid images. Human remorse, marvelous animated slushes of tears, and a desire to scrub away consequences, (perhaps simultaneously scrubbing away some beauty), scrubbing lavender in twilight, leave us in a state of regret. Sections III and IV introduce the arts and artifice: graphite     where all the wonders were     isn't stable. Staples and pigment appear, and fabric migrates back. The question is asked, Who is it harder for......let's not think the waters care     if our toxins poison depths We surmise that it may be harder for us, realizing what we have done or What We Do, ongoing. Nature probably does not have the exact consciousness we project on it. Section IV says the fox is not thinking what we think she is thinking. This is no paradise put forth as reality. Boundaries between nature and human are still relevant. And then the wish or vision arises, for less separation.

winds nuzzling in the grasses despite / our borrowing      as if     

a linear transformation       narrowed / Could we become not

separate     who tipples now / free-scattered       various

Explicitly religious references make a few doubtful appearances, including a humorous poem beginning with the speaker being poked by her friend at church, to see a Jesus with a broken, dangling arm on the altar boy's pole. In one poem, the speaker wishes to light a candle in a holy place, but no longer believes in God. She hears the command from somewhere to kneel, but cannot. The line  all the furniture of the pagan soul    tucked in her cathedral     of grace, brings forward the thought already discussed here, that this collection accesses deeper recesses that are spiritual. The poem Pentecost, about the red-orange fire of a racehorse, conjures the supposed fire of the holy spirit at Pentecost, and the gathered people speaking in tongues.

Owen's poems flare and disappear like movie images from an old projector, but it is a magic projector that can feed multiple overlapping frames, and loop double and quadruple exposures, creating something entirely new. Cinematic panoramas sweep through urban and natural landscapes in the poems, but also unfold in-close, in the intimate focus and blur of human lives, contradicting our idea of a panorama.

when you leave someone        you said / to yourself in the elevator

going down / the folds and creases of a shirt      the threads and buttons

rushing past / the instant making such economic noise

Close to the skin, Owen writes: I try to listen to my cells        I try. Active listening to active

characters—cells—as they multiply, create, and die. They contain DNA, leaving traces everywhere, even in the body of an old lover. These dynamics are felt as a core ordering of the poetry, urgent and corporeal. Time and space are alive, illuminated early in the book by quotes concerning entanglement. These poems are warm and humanly connected. On windows, Owen writes:

were they portals or were they space / was I kind enough