The impression I get, Mary, is of my ear falling through the lines of the poem, a relentless tumble down through the rush of letters and words and their emotional correspondences & resonances—. Yet that descent into darkness, that final fall, is interrupted and ultimately alleviated by the strong rhymes and the fiercely end-stopped lines which act as handholds that I catch onto as I fall. They almost bruise me as I bump against them, but they slow my approach to the abyss, they save me from surrendering too fully to that silence at fall's end. That quality of being saved, however, is not all light, it has a dark side too, it has the melancholy property of allowing one to continue to hear the moan of the painful past—that background moan that tunes "my voice", that abyss which must be faced even by a life recovered. It's as if true survival always harmonizes with its opposite.
Nemo
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