Goldensohn’s “Dissolving” aims to be a tour de force – a 15-line poem written as one long sentence.

His choice is apt for this poem. Just as the reader is suspended, held aloft waiting for the period at the end of the sentence, so also is the man in the poem suspended, held aloft in the water, waiting (or hoping) for his intense memories to become “weightless stuff ready / to drift away in the water and air and light.”

The poem is well-balanced. At the beginning of the poem, the man forgets “the dangerous weight of his body,” while at the end of the poem he hopes to forget his possibly dangerous memories. The poem contrasts the man’s body’s weight with the “weightless stuff” of his memories. In the first half of the poem, the man is described as “one with the water and air and light,” while at the end he waits for memories “to drift away in the water and air and light.”

And the word “ruminant” is a play on words, suggesting both an animal that re-chews what has already been chewed and a meditative person.

But for me, the poem is not wholly successful. The switch from a floating body to the metaphor of a cow chewing its cud is so abrupt as to be laughable, and I’m not sure that’s what the author intended.

Further, any time an author attempts the high-wire act of an overly long sentence, he invites the reader (well, this one anyway) to ruminate on whether or not that sentence is grammatically correct and/ or clear. And, yes, I found parts of the poem distracting. The pronoun “he” in line 7 seems to be adrift from any grammatical construction in the sentence. And later, it sounds like it’s the metaphoric ruminant disgorging the sobbing face, the debate, the screech of delight, rather than the man’s “mind digesting meanings.”

Now that I think of it, I wonder how appropriate the metaphor of a ruminant really is, since its cud never really becomes “weightless.” Is this poem the description of what happens to the floating man or what he wants to happen?

For me, Goldensohn’s “Dissolving” is not as successful as another of his Slate poems, “Walking in Fog.”

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SUBWAY by Barry Goldensohn

The station platform, clean and broad, his stage
for push-ups, sit-ups, hamstring stretch,
as he laid aside his back pack, from which
his necessaries bulged, as he bulged
through jeans torn at butt, knee and thigh,
in deep palaver with himself--sigh,
chatter, groan. Deranged but common.
We sat at a careful distance to spy
on his performance, beside a woman
in her thirties, dressed as in her teens --
this is L.A. -- singing to herself.
How composed, complete and sane
she seemed. A book by the Dalai Lama
in her hands, her face where pain and wrong
were etched, here becalmed, with faint chirps
leaking from the headphones of her walkman.
Not talking. Singing, lost in song.

Hi, MaryAnn, I always appreciate it when you post additional poems by a poet -- I like to look for similarities and differences. It's fun, for example, to see that not all of Goldensohn's poems consist of single sentences.

It's interesting that while Goldensohn chooses very simple titles (or seems to), there is more meaning to them than might be taken at first glance. In "Walking in Fog," one can be walking around in a fog or, literally, out on a foggy morning. Even "Subway" might be indicate an underground or different-than-norm way of doing things.

Likewise, I think "Dissolving" could be interpreted in multiple ways. The dictionary lists six meanings, including melting, merging, disintegrating, terminating, disappearing, or dissolving as in the film/TV technique.

I like to think that the title might refer to both the narrator's memories and the narrator himself.

(And I just realized that I mistakenly linked my review to "Walking in Fog" rather than "Dissolved.")

a quick 2 c's:

I see the title as pointing to what IT in another thread referred to re meditation. I read it as a meditation on the act (the art and science?) of dissolving. To me, the narrator (poet?) is reflecting on all the ways in which he can dissolve - notably domestic ups and downs that may have overtaken and decentered him - the trauma on the stairs, the angers, the ecstasies too ... and attempting to let a physical lake-floating 'dissolution' inform his letting-go of anxieties ...

While I'm at it, I will say that the first 3 lines of the poem found me having my own ups and downs about the poem - the first line was intriguing because of the potential ominousness of the 'dangerous weight' (and, as per above comment, another source of anxiety for him?), the second brought a metaphor I quite liked and found to be fresh ("the calm skin of the lake"), but then the third line crashed me down with a bang: His insertion of "female" felt, for my mind, way too didactic, telling rather than showing, and leading us by the hand way too strongly toward his message ... I had a hard time getting past that. And then, once a bit soured like that, it perhaps influenced my finding the repetition of "the water and air and light" in lines 8 and 15 to be self-conscious rather than a "purposeful seeming union of atoms" :-) ....

z

Hi, zinya,

Regarding the repetition of 'water and air and light,' I spent some time during my first reading of the poem puzzling out whether it was one of those several poetic forms where words are repeated at certain intervals. Three lines in the poem end with 'light,' four if you count 'delight.' But I think that was just one of those things (intentional, but not, e.g., a tritina).

Sometimes I read a poem by plucking out certain words from its innards, and in that respect, Goldensohn has done some interesting things with short i's and with t's. Look at all the words that end in 't' or have a 't' in the middle of them -- forgetting, weight, receptive, bright, fast, water, light. I think that's a few more t's than would occur on average in a random sentence. As to the i's, there is skin, thin, him, drift. I really think it adds something to the poem, something subtle yet ... dangerously weighty?

PS - Just parsed my first sentence of this post, checking to see if my comment about how many t's occur in a random sentence was accurate. Hmmm. Are there just more t's than I've ever noticed?