Ordinary Pleasures

In his introduction to Shells (1999), Craig Arnold’s debut and winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the poet W.S. Merwin writes, “One thing that I found attractive, and hopeful, in Mr. Arnold’s collection … is an unwavering fidelity to pleasure, a kind of affectionate confidence in enjoyment, in both the running chatter and the irrational magnetic rightness of the senses.” Merwin touches here on what makes Arnold’s work so distinctive: it’s both of the body and metaphysical, grounded in concrete human relationships yet expressing states—anticipation, death, inevitability—that can be hard to convey in poems. Shells explores other themes, too: the limitations of male friendship, the occasional raucous charm of drunks, the pain of suicide, and the mythmaking that underlies romantic love. Made Flesh (2008), Arnold’s follow-up, is more formally experimental. The collection consists of seven hyper-detailed poems that often play out like vignettes in which the reader is addressed directly, becoming a you who watches life unravel into beauty laced with pain. In these two collections, Arnold established himself as a cartographer of pleasure—both the sensuality of daily life and the unique satisfaction that can follow heartache.

For his third collection, tentatively titled An Exchange for Fire, Arnold began researching volcanoes, and traveled to Greece, Sicily, Guatemala, and Nicaragua before heading to Japan as part of the US-Japan Creative Artists Program. His idea was to write about how volcanoes reflect the shaky relationship between humans and nature, as well as our own delicate sense of mortality. It proved a prescient theme. On April 27, 2009, the 41-year-old Arnold went missing during a solo hike in Kuchinoerabu-jima. Believing he fell to his death, authorities spent weeks searching for Arnold but never found his body. (The blog Arnold kept during his time in Japan, Volcano Pilgrim, is still online, with the final entry dated a day before his disappearance.) Various tributes and memorial essays have since appeared, including Love, an Index (2012), a collection by Arnold’s partner Rebecca Lindenberg. In 2009, Poetry’s then-editor Christian Wiman celebrated Arnold’s “flair that seemed to arise naturally out of his character rather than being appliqued on; the mercurial and protean nature of his subjects … the hell-bent hungers and raptures kept in check—or at least, kept intact, intelligible—by the tough-minded conscience and craft that ran through the poems like a spine.”

Much of Arnold’s work—and nearly all of the poems in Shells—celebrates the self as, foremost, a physical being. In this regard, his verse recalls that of the contemporary Greek poet Olga Broumas, whose poems likewise foreground the physical body and sex, and hint at eroticism without making it the subject. Early Arnold poems such as “For a Cook” and “Scrubbing Mussels” find bodily joy in food and in the sensual pleasures of cooking. Consider, for example, these lines from “Scrubbing Mussels”:

But in the time it takes your brush to scour
away the cement their beards secrete to stick
to the rock, to one another, you find the lure
 
of intimacy a temptation.

Note the moments of sibilance and half-rhymes: “scour” and “cement,” “scour” and “secrete,” “secrete” and “stick,” “stick” and “rock.” All of this melodious language leads to “intimacy” in only the first five lines. The poem’s mix of earnestness and vulnerability seduces the reader, although it’s seduction predicated on a sensory appeal rather than sex or gender. Mussels are brushed, palmed, cupped, warmed, and treated with tenderness, mimicking the way new lovers might explore the contours of each other’s bodies.

Sensory details that evoke pleasure is a hallmark of Arnold’s work. In “The Power Grip,” from Shells, the reader encounters a barfly who scrawls shapes in a puddle of alcohol with a wet fingertip before going on to demonstrate a technique for cunnilingus. The character is a typical classless drunk, yet he and the poem’s speaker enjoy an apparent rapport, both through the vulgarity of the sexual demonstration and through the vulnerability of the water etching. Arnold’s smooth, rounded words—once, our, obscure, pool—ease the distance between each small gesture:

This should make me upset, I know, but the receiver
      is warm and round and is an exact fit
 
to my ear, the voice that fills it—so easy to get used
      to the liberties he takes, the indiscretion
 
of age, skill, seasoning. Men don’t talk enough
      about fucking, he told me once, and leaned
 
closer across our table in the bar’s dark corner,
      the tip of his middle finger wet, tracing
 
obscure designs in a pool of spilled beer.

In “Grace,” also from Shells, Arnold pays tribute to the late singer Jeff Buckley, who drowned in 1997. Arnold recaps Buckley’s life and then pleads with the singer’s spirit to

give us the grace to slowly find each other
     out, the shed skin, the loss of in-
 
nocence you’ve been the patron of—the boy
     who lost his, tossed to one
 
end of a strange bed, the thread drawn
     out of his body into another’s
 
privacy, until you lullaby’d
     him back to the sad eroded sleep

Arnold’s languid words—slowly, innocence, loss—build anticipation and slow slippery in-rhymes such as “who lost his, tossed to one / end of a strange bed.” The poem’s somber tone and deliberate pacing lull the reader, although the mood is later undercut by the revelation that “in that husband’s side/ you are a thorn, tucked into/ his wife’s purse next to the contraceptives, / the one abandon he can’t share.” In just a few lines, Arnold likens the haunting, hurt quality of Buckley’s music to an insurmountable issue (never disclosed) in a couple’s life.

The sensuality in Arnold’s poems is distinct from lust. In his work, sex mixes with more ordinary pleasures such as cooking, drinking, cleaning, or conversation. But he does sometimes scrutinize the human condition through the lens of sex and relationships. Most of the long poems in Made Flesh read like pseudo diary entries detailing the micro-dramas of betrayal, caution, desire, and love that constitute coupledom and marriage. In Shells, these scenes play out in briefer, more personal poems of longing or romantic failure. In “Roommates,” for example, Arnold chronicles a friend’s relationship, both explicitly and via the metaphor of a jack-o-lantern that begins as a healthy pumpkin but ends up rotten just in time to herald the breakup. Small moments in the poem—the wrinkling of a woman’s nose, the sharing of a last cigarette—are juxtaposed against the larger narrative. The last passage showcases Arnold’s strengths as a poet:

Each morning when you drive him in your car
to work he rolls the window down—the trunk
still reeks of melon, he says, still makes him sick.
Your little ritual. He hates being driven
around like this, hates having you to pick
him up, but he always asks, the familiar air
of apology for asking, as if each
time were the first, nothing ever given.

Arnold examines masculine pride in these final lines. The roommate needs soothed but doesn’t know how to admit that without betraying his own masculinity. The car rides are a way for him to cope, with the vehicle’s forward movement a buffer between his pain and his need to confront it. Arnold’s speaker, ever sensitive to the wishes of his friend, understands that the ride is a kind of therapy.

In “Incubus,” the simple act of making tea frames the psychosexual relationship between a young, lonely woman and a body-snatching demon. While lines such as “If you’re not using your body right now / maybe you’d let me borrow it for a while?” border on the nightmarish, the poem is ultimately about how one deals with abuse and entrapment. Arnold’s heroine finds relief in domesticity. Making tea softens her pain and lets her achieve normalcy, while the act of serving tea is an assertion of power and self-possession. As Arnold writes, the woman and the demon can “feel what they have learned inside each other / fair and enough, and not without a kind / of satisfaction, that she can put her foot / down, clear to the bottom of desire, / and find that it can stop, and go no deeper.” While there’s loneliness and despair in the heroine’s pain, there’s also the possibility of overcoming her (literal) demon.

Arnold’s emotional depth benefits from simple language. “Couple from Hell,” included in Made Flesh, focuses on the romantic struggle between a stifled woman and her stunted male companion, and includes lines such as “SHE is Persephone / with a lapful of flowers / with a light foot and an easy faith / that the grass will take her feet without bending.” The poem never threatens to buckle under the weight of an ostensibly highbrow reference such as “Persephone,” nor does it ring hollow or seem pretentious. Among Arnold’s gifts is an attentiveness to language that doesn’t feel labored. In this respect, his work recalls that of David St. John, whose ear for musicality and deft, sensual phrasing makes his work appear similarly effortless. In St. John’s poem “The Opal Trees,” from Prism (2002), enjambment gives the work a sense of fluidity and airiness:

As I awaken to the moonscape
 
Of this solitary bed,
Still feeling the soft satin of stone
& the blossoms of the opal trees
Littering the sheets of earth beneath me
As their shattered rinds
Swirl through the branches of the dream
 
Of your body upon my body.

Some of the line breaks here—between “trees” and “littering,” and “rinds” and “swirl”—naturally bridge noun and action, and give the poem a headlong momentum. Arnold achieves a similar effect in “Couple from Hell,” in which “lapful of flowers” glides into “with a light foot,” and “an easy faith” moves into “that the grass will take her feet without bending.” The repetition of “f” sounds and long a/o/e vowels make for nimble phrasing that lets Arnold steer the poem without lofty or precious language.

Most of Arnold’s work features speakers who comment on or describe their own lack of confidence, whether in a new city or during a tryst. They’re almost tender in their inability to know if things will work out. By immersing readers in these real-time narratives, Arnold lends a cinematic quality to the scenes he describes. In “Couple from Hell,” the second-person point of view invites readers to live out the messy, complicated relationship with She/Persephone, the depressed love object, and to experience resentment curdle into aggression. In less capable hands, this could be daunting or uncomfortable for the reader, but Arnold’s all-purpose “you” allows him to comment on the general nature of unhealthy relationships while also positioning the reader to vicariously endure the life cycle of this particular relationship. In doing so, Arnold urges readers to reflect on their own romantic failures.

“Mistral,” from Made Flesh, is another poem written in the second person. It begins with a past version of “you” driving, “SPEEDING across the wide white/ slate of the salt flat once     you passed a car / flipped over.” The poem cuts expository fat to blur the line between the poem and the dream state of the subconscious. Arnold presents a vulnerable narrator who witnesses car crashes, teaches English to Spanish women, and struggles to feel OK while living in Spain. Unlike other Arnold narrators who are certain and self-aware, this speaker struggles to reconcile past identity with the identity he (or she) hopes to realize in this new place.

The poem’s unidentified “you” passes the flipped car full of apple crates and comes upon an intoxicating German car:

this devilish and much to be desired
car     whose sole purpose is to tempt you
into folly     this car is up for sale
by a German      also much to be desired
six feet of blond with a superhero jaw.

By blending the specific (German, “six feet of blond”) with the undefined (you), Arnold pushes readers to project themselves into the imagined space he’s created, and to inhabit the narrator’s role. Later in the poem, Arnold writes

When you look up       the wind has changed
as sudden as the twisting of a lens
back into focus    everywhere you look
seems otherwise     you no longer
see yourself over your own shoulder
in the second person     you have snapped
back into your body.

The narrative is almost meta here, and suggests that readers might now remove themselves from the poem and return to their own lives as passive observers since the turmoil that overtook the narrator has passed. The white spaces in the lines mimic coming out of a daze or a fog. The poem’s unnamed “you” shakes off the uncertainty he or she has faced on this journey.

Arnold’s use of mythology adds a deeper allusive dimension to his poems, whether they’re the fable-esque mermaid tales in Shells, or the more violent works in Made Flesh. “Hymn to Persephone,” from the latter collection, begins

Help me remember this  how once the dead were locked
out of the ground    and wandered sleepless and sun-blinded
She was the one who took them each by the hand    helped them
lay their bodies back in the dark sweet decay
gladly               as onto a lover’s bed           they call her Koré
the Maiden              a dark queen with a crown of blood-colored poppies

Arnold uses Greek myth to introduce the story of Persephone and play with the mythologizing of complex women. Rather than focus on the abduction of Persephone (Koré) by Hades, Arnold speaks to her role as Queen of the Underworld, where she took the souls of the dead down to the next plane to face their fate.

Even self-generated myths, such as the one in “Bird-Understander” (an uncollected Arnold poem), offer insights into a romantic partner’s limitations. This poem’s “you” is perhaps Lindenberg, who sees a bird in the airport and wishes she “could take the bird outside / and set it free or    (failing that) / call a bird-understander / to come help the bird.” Arnold suggests that Lindenberg is a bird-understander, since she can face pain without turning away. Unlike much of Arnold’s work, this poem also includes an “I,” with the mythic role of bird-understander a way to differentiate between himself and his partner. Arnold writes, “You are a bird-understander / better than I could ever be / who make so many noises / and call them song.” The faux-mythic concept contrasts the emotional limitations between two lovers, and, as in many Arnold poems, the speaker is the one who has less to give.

Darkness, too, is an inevitable part of Arnold’s verse, as evidenced by the second stanza of “Artichoke,” from Shells:

It is a nymph that some god tries to grab
and have his way with, I explain. She scorns
his lust; and when he sees he’s met his match,
he turns her to a flower, covered with thorns
to keep her other lovers out of reach.
 
You say You made that up. You say That’s sick.
You say The things men think of are so cruel.

While savagery plays out in these lines, words such as grab, scorns, flower, thorns, and reach connote pain, ego, and a kind of animal instinct to guard what one “owns.” Here, again, Arnold invokes myth to get at the cruelty and possessiveness that can underly trysts. Unlike the poems in Made Flesh, the mythology isn’t commenting on the destructive nature of relationships. Instead, the brutality is anecdotal, something the speaker shares with a “you” who is falling out of love. The speaker recognizes that “It hasn’t been / so long since liking me for being clever / stopped being enough for you.” Arnold’s work typically portrays life as long stretches of darkness pocked by small moments of sensuality, but here the other side of that darkness ends up being painful, as the speaker fails to end things with “you” so that no one gets hurt like the god and his nymph.

These pockets of light always float just beyond the poem. “Merman,” from Shells, begins with two people finding each other on the beach, possibly after one’s botched suicide, and it ends with passion, as the speaker can finally see his own humanity. He imagines himself “given over into a curdle / of foam, beckoned across the crests and troughs of a current / to which all bodies in the end submit.” For the speaker, this is akin to happiness, even if it’s painful.

While Arnold is a poet of pleasure, his work suggests that pleasure contains multitudes, both clearly positive and less apparently so, including death, heartache, misery, isolation, confusion, and desperation. To read his work is to understand the potential joy in pain, and the rich sense of being alive. Though his disappearance remains a mystery, his poems remain profound and haunting testaments to the pleasures he experienced.