Emily Pettit, Goat in the Snow

HOW TO LOSE LOST OBJECTS

 

This is the memory of a house, so no one lives here.

Here we like our emergencies savvy, ravens

flying low, close to our witness. Try standing

and watching yourself disappear. A new way

to see things is kaleidoscope style. When you walk

past a certain kind of light, you can cast

six different shadows all shaped like you.

One wakes every fifteen minutes. One waits

for a specific series of noises. The walls here

hold wind, whether you believe it or not.

Hey house, how come you terrorize with anchorage?

We would like to disprove the watched-pot-never-boils

theory, though our waiting chore seems on the verge

of destruction. Any not staying lost with the lost

thing feels like a betrayal. House full of tumbleweed.

Mouth full of tumbleweed.

What immediately becomes clear about American poet Emily Pettit's first trade poetry collection, Goat in the Snow (Birds, LLC, 2012) is the fact that it would be impossible to not be charmed on sight with any book dedicated to “Rita the magnificent.” Built in three sections of short poems, Pettit’s are poems that turn on their end. Odd and surreally-charming, her pieces stretch logic into something entirely other, and entirely her own, while making more clear sense than you might ever want to admit. As she writes to open the poem “Red Wings Collapsing,” “What do you call a field of black telephones ringing? / A problem? Sometimes I make ridiculous gestures / with my arms and legs, and call it dancing.”

Given that so many of her poem titles begin with “How to,” one might suspect that these pieces have been composed as instructions or suggestions, perhaps, on how to navigate through the world, such as “HOW TO RECOGNIZE WHEN YOU HAVE BEHAVED BADLY AND BEHAVE BETTER,” “HOW TO HIDE FROM ANOTHER” or “HOW TO HIDE AN ELEPHANT.” There are lessons stretched across these narratives, small truths buried deep beneath other truths, each one a bit more unusual than the one before, and the shades of her surreal gaze are reminiscent of the poems of American poet Sommer Browning, or the landscapes of writer Stuart Ross. How could you not want to live within the fields of Emily Pettit’s poems? The beauty of such a collection is not in her illogic, but what she does with logic, creating her own spaces, and her own worlds where her logic makes the most sense of all.

HOW TO START A FIRE WITHOUT STICKS

Get up. get up and pretend that your head isn’t full

of tiny broken sticks. It will be worth it to walk

through the door such a complicated mess,

crazy to such purpose. One way to torture a person

who is sleep deprived is to pretend the house is on

fire. Look very serious and say, Fire! Fire! Fire!

Look very serious and say, Water! Water! Water!

Look very serious and say, You built a better body

of water. Yes you did. Where did you find such a

stunning embankment? Pretend you put out the fire

with the better body of water. Pretend you are

a medium to large marine mammal. I will be

a fly on the wall dressed as a person, a person who

has complicated ideas about what constitutes a wall.

No doubt I’m a little faded, dejected, incognito,

noncommittal. I only do practical things.