Poem of the Week | May 01, 2023

This week’s Poem of the Week is “Long After the Coda” by Anne Cecelia Holmes.

Anne Cecelia Holmes is the author of the poetry collection The Jitters (horse less press 2015) and three chapbooks, including Dead Year (Sixth Finch 2016). Her poems have been published in Bone Bouquet, Guesthouse, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Maryland.

 

Long After the Coda

It is the gutter of summer
and everyone is losing

their bloom. Again
I lose the word for how

to feel watching strangers
eat alone in public

but I do remember
the yellow house

where I first learned
to scream. I remember

a man shoving gum
in my hair as if kneading

a beautiful sourdough
he had yet to name.

This is not a drill
nor a particularly telling

pathology. I’d rather
not be a vessel at all.

What I want
is a metaphor for the body

more original than the curve
of a crushed refrain.

To teach myself endurance
I cracked open the snow globe

and devoured its shimmering guts.
 

Author’s Note

In classical music, a coda is the passage that concludes a piece after its natural ending; it can recast the central structure in a new light or depart from it completely. I once had an orchestra conductor who talked about codas as a composer’s attempt to resolve the “musical argument” of a symphony. I love that idea, and how we can think of codas more broadly, too. Codas reshape and complicate our relationships to closure. They echo and escalate. They make us take stock of what has come before, and often resist tidiness. This is what I’m constantly doing in my head, and it’s what this poem is doing: revisiting and expanding, looping and refusing, creating addendums to arguments that I’ve already given endings.

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