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            “Divination,” which comes next, unsettles afresh with a menacing peek at delusional romance, like something out of the head of Blanche DuBois.  It is a pantoum, one of the French forms in which lines are repeated in a pattern of refrains. In this case, the repetition serves to mock the mounting tension of wondering what the future holds, from the beginning:

Always be ready for the unexpected.
Someone you have dreamed about may visit.
Better clean house to make the right impression.
There are some things you should not think about.

to the end:

Notice the cool appraisal of his eyes.
Better clean house to make the right impression.
You sometimes wonder what you’re waiting for.
Always be ready for the unexpected.

            A paradoxically strained but fluent self-consciousness unites much of Gioia’s poetry.  In “The Voyeur,” a scene of domestic bliss is made sensuously psychedelic and hauntingly weird, when a husband, seized by the impression that he is “missing” from his life, imagines he is watching his existence from the branches of a tree outside his bedroom window:  “He notices a cat curled on the bed./ He hears a woman singing in the shower./ The branches shake their dry leaves like alarms.”

            These and the last poem in this group, “The Litany,” bring two poets to mind. Indeed, their influence is felt throughout Interrogations at Noon.  Gioia’s own essays on the lives and work of Robinson Jeffers and Weldon Kees are included in his volume, Can Poetry Matter?  Of Jeffers, Gioia writes, “Jeffers’s central human obsessions emerge as the suffocating burden of the past on human freedom... and the impossibility of human salvation.”  Of Kees, he writes, “The mythic landscape of Kees’s poetry is the wasteland, a fallen world where real time has stopped,” and, “the vision of human destiny as an endless succession of heroes who try to redeem this fallen world and always fail.” 

            In his poem, “For My Daughter,” Weldon Kees captures desolation with one line:  “These speculations sour in the sun.”  But Gioia’s acidity is tempered; he writes of sorrow, not bitterness.  Kees wrote about a child he never had, contrary to Gioia, who, years ago, lost a four month-old son to sudden infant death syndrome, a loss from which he will never fully recover.  It permeates much of his poetry, most notably in his last book, The Gods of Winter, with the title poem, and the widely cherished, “Planting a Sequoia.”  Here, “The Litany,” as its title suggests, is an anaphoric lament:

This is a litany to earth and ashes,
to the dust of roads and vacant rooms,
to the fine silt circling in a shaft of sun,
settling indifferently on books and beds.
This is a prayer to praise what we become,
“Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return.”
Savor its taste — the bitterness of earth and ashes.
This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished,
for you, my love, my loss, my lesion,
a rosary of words to count out time’s
illusions, all the minutes, hours, days
the calendar compounds as if the past
existed somewhere — like an inheritance
still waiting to be claimed.

            Section II, which contains the heaviest burdens of the past, is announced with a quotation from Jeffers:  “I have heard the summer dust crying to be born.”   In the same vein as “The Litany” (“a benediction on the death of a young god,/ brave and beautiful, rotting on a tree”), “Metamorphosis” extends its tearful explorations: 

I’ll never know, my changeling, where you’ve gone,
And so I’ll praise you — flower, bird, and tree —
My nightingale awake among the thorns,
My laurel tree that marks a god’s defeat,
My blossom bending on the water’s edge,
Forever lost within your inward gaze.

            “Pentecost” comes next.  It opens with  “the sorrows of afternoon,” recalling the afflictions of “Interrogations at Noon.” The poet is reliving sleepless nights, “when memory/ Repeats its prosecution.”  Like Jeffers, Gioia often writes of flames and ash; but here they are the mystical fires of the New Testament, and only serve to intensify the heart’s suffering.  Jeffers, on the other hand, is all earthly fire and godless nature, the very things that give him solace.  Upon the death of his wife, Una, Jeffers wrote:

                                                     But the ashes have fallen
                 And the flame has gone up; nothing human remains.  You are
                            earth and air; you are in the beauty of the ocean
                 And the great streaming triumphs of sundown; you are alive
                             and well in the tender young grass rejoicing
                 When soft rain falls all night, and little rosy-fleeced clouds
                             float on the dawn. — I shall be with you presently.

            For Gioia, “Nor the morning’s ache for dream’s illusion, nor any prayers/Improvised to an unknowable god/ Can extinguish the flame.”  While the Pentecostal tongues of fire revived and empowered the disciples of Christ, Gioia writes desolately, “Death has been our pentecost,/ And our innocence consumed by these implacable/ Tongues of fire.”  The poem ends in mournful resignation, “I offer you this scarred and guilty hand/ Until others mix our ashes.”  The poet’s je m’accuse  ethos  persists. He leans hard on his “scarred and guilty hand,” but it can never be hard enough, as in the spirit of Robert Frost, who also suffered the loss of children, and wrote in his great poem, “To Earthward:”  “When stiff and sore and scarred/ I take away my hand/ From leaning on it hard/ In grass and sand, // The hurt is not enough;” and,  “Now no joy but lacks salt, / That is not dashed with pain/ And weariness and fault.”