“That for which we find words,” the radically brilliant German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche remarks in The Twilight of the Idols, “is something already dead in us. There is always a contempt in the act of speaking.” In Leila Chatti’s lyric “Equinox,” the poet finds words for that which might have been otherwise unsayable, albeit with an apparent contempt. The poem is, in other words, an interesting essay on the enactment of that contempt perpetrated by the act of speaking, of reminiscing, of expressing.

There is much to be desired about the beginning of the poem: “A dream can kill you.” From the inevitable ambiguity of the word “dream,” its sentimentally detached tone to the precision of its curtly pronounced violence, we know we are in the presence of a poem of ambition. At least until the lines that followed discard the basic structure of syntax:

Blood streaming from
Me not equal to its loss.
.
.
.
The wind in the tree
A negative thing.

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In these particular lines, the inference of timeless chaos is technically achieved. Their syntactic structure mirrors the disjunctive language or pseudo-experience of dream, which is everything but linear or even sensible. However, sometimes too much may be sacrificed for technical slickness which, in this case, is the kind of memorability activated by predictability.

The disruption of balance realised in those lines is something which is easily restored to the betterment of the poem by conforming to the convention of syntax. This is because by achieving balance through music or smooth readability between the linebreaks, the act of speaking out, of expressing pain, transposes the poem from conforming to the pain of loss and dread expressed, but to an eternal resistance of it. However, Chatti is too talented a poet not to have seen the resistance of the verbal presence to be of smoother rendition of the poem. It seems she is too preoccupied with the subject of loss and its attendant constituents to name it as such any less. By this, the poet makes poetry itself the secondary subject of the poem rather than its first.

In addition, there is more beyond the subjective decision of the poet. Even beyond her keen impulse to exact that experience on poetic reality. It follows that perhaps, as is the basic effect of a dream on the psyche, the poet is not too sure of her recollection to articulate the presentness or the pastness of the dream experience—the time, movement, and motion of its content. Perhaps the speaker’s too afraid to activate the dream with words as simple as “is” to suggest the existing, quite engorging presence of its experience. After all,  “A dream can kill you.” Or perhaps the poet wants us to share in the lonely acuteness of their personal loss and sorrow. After all, they “do not possess the faith required” to see past the “loss” in the grander scheme of things. Perhaps our frustration serves for the poet as a sort of balm on the quite unreasonable sting of imperfection. Perhaps.

Anyway, the ending is a restoration of sort, of what its middle has taken from us in the staying power of music, the appurtenances of cathartic satisfaction, and the possibility of resistance achieved equally through technique, albeit through submission to convention. The question is, Is this a poem we should want to live with? Against the resoundingly felt no of the middle, the beginning answers yes for it to be a reminder of the destructive power of dream. The ending too answers yes in whose content we discover, as the speaker discovers, vitality or liveliness, even if it is as faint and receding like everyone else’s lives, “like a voice at the end / of weeping, like a question / after a door closes.”

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“Equinox” by Leila Chatti published by The Yale Review, Poems of the Divine Folio, December 2023

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