Dawn Lundy Martin, Instructions for The Lovers

 

In the end, I suppose, defeat is inevitable,
            the closing of something once delicately propped
open, a silk curtain floated back to its nature,
            or a mother, which is what this is really about—fetish of
the mother, the fetish of her under my tongue, bleating
            about. Even I can’t let go, can’t sift her being (that part
of her that’s her) from my hands. What’s wanted
            is not to be gotten, no frolic in dancing fields,
no cupping of the invisible cup, gentle water, soft hand,
            sweet ache of breath into mine. Mine, slats between—what
was it? What is it now? When your voice comes through
            my ear, technological and distant, the crack of it
as much a weapon as a frozen foot, as much the desert’s
            reflective waterwell as any (                                      )—
You see that? My hands arching around what would be absence
            If absence were rot inside the body. We both hold it. (“FROM WHICH THE THING IS MADE”)

The fifth full-length poetry title by American poet and essayist Dawn Lundy Martin is the remarkable Instructions for The Lovers (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2024). I admire the delicate precision of Martin’s lyrics, set with a clear sense of music and the line. “The lover was here and then was not.” she writes, to open the prose-block “INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE LOVERS,” This is always / the case. The lover persists in loverness and then, poof. / Not poof poof but out of the kitchen and casual naked- / ness. The lover is a long tail though. Whipping around.” Her poems hold a determination, weave and pitch; a clarity of purpose and a narrative delicacy, weaving simultaneously around and through her subjects, fully aware of the shapes of her stories.

Opening with a minimalist sequence, “[After wind was water],” the poems evolve across three section-clusters of sharp lyrics before ending with a sequence of prose poems, and an extended, accumulated phrase-lyric. While some might shift form as exploratory, Martin already employs a mastery across a variety of structures, all of which allow for her particular rhythm of narrative unfolding. “And yet,” the poem “A WILD WEED” offers, “what savagery disrobes inside order? / What street fight made fragile in a hot / face glow parted so that, so that / all liquid is in retrieval.”