A Protocol for Touch

"Constance Merritt is a poet to defeat categories, to oppose 'the tyranny of names' with a poetry that sets its own terms of encounter, its 'protocols of touch'--tender and austere, formal and intimate at once. Hers is a voice with many musics, sufficiently rich, nuanced and various to express, maintain poise and wrest meaning from the powerful cross-currents in which the heart is torn. I have seldom seen intelligence equal to such a scorching degree of intensity, or mastery of form so equal to passion's contradictory occasions. Merritt's prosodic range is prodigious--she moves in poetic forms as naturally as a body moves in its skin, even as her lines ring with the cadenced authority of a gifted and schooled ear. Here, in her words, the iambic ground bass is in its vital questioning mode: "The heart's insistent undersong: how live?/how live? How live?" this poetry serves no lesser necesssity than to ask that."--Eleanor Wilner

Between us, how we wrestle over words

Strain to wring some blessing from the silence,

Deliverance from violence, its fear, its lure,

The tyranny of names: night day,

Sable and alabaster, flint shale,

Steel and lace. Who among us can afford

To speak the language--any language--rightly?

As if it weren't enough to bear one heart

Eternally divided in its chambers?

We stand close enough to touch. We do

Not touch. Between us burns a sword of fire,

A rusted turnstile glinting in the sun.