"Cricket" by Lisa Ross Spaar

It's beautiful out, mind-blowing, in fact, for Kansas in early November. So I won't waste my time or yours with a long post; I have a long bike ride to attend to, and I'm sure you have some very important picnicking or perambulating to do. I'll just post another poem that I love from The Best American Poetry 2008.

According to poet Lisa Ross Spaar, the poem "Cricket" is about hearing a cricket singing as she wanders her house at night, battling a bout of insomnia. But because of the word "font" in the second line, the poem always makes me think of Cricket font, so I kind of like to pretend that the poem is an apostrophe to the font instead of a meditation on nighttime chirping.

Cricket.

 

Still, it's a great poem however you want to read it. I love (love love love) the sounds; I can't get enough of reading this poem aloud just to hear how "Apocalyptic knucklebone, / black letter font" and "stiff thicket of broom" and "Hasp of flesh, sear fact" rattle around in my mouth. Beautiful-sounding poems are definitely underrated, and the sounds in Spaar's poem are exactly what elevates the poem's story (insomnia and a dark room) from the mundane and into the stratosphere of poetic awesomeness.

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Cricket

By Lisa Ross Spaar

From The Best American Poetry 2008

First published in Meridian 

Apocalyptic knucklebone,

    black-letter font

so antique among the modern things,

you cause the room to flinch

    at my intrusion,

quaver in corners, trill

in mortised triplets the crowded

    heavy boots,

sodden mat, stiff thicket of broom.

Your ceremonial frequencies

    abrade what I might choose

to forget, lonely scrape of a chair

under fluorescent morgue-light

    of winter kitchen,

wince as the soul divides.

Hasp of flesh, sear fact

    through which your trespass,

your vesper curfew gnaws.