“Wing”: Why We Like It

It’s wonderful to have our offices here in the campus clock tower (a space we’re afforded because no one knows we’ve moved in), but the giant, moving machinery—wheels and pinions, swinging levers, spinning gears—could be considered a hazard of the job. One quickly learns how to duck, hop, and somersault with the rest of the staff, but every once in a while a new editor does the splits a half-second later than everyone else, and then—whoosh!—is snatched by the shirt collar and disappears into the depths of the mechanism for a twelve-hour rotation. Lucky for us, Lisa Ampleman  (who will be joining our nimble staff in the fall), had our forthcoming issue in hand when a pulley dragged her up to the auxiliary ratchet, which then shifted her over to the drive shaft mainspring. While she spun, rotated, and turned through the night, she managed to chime out the following message across campus every hour on the hour.

Lisa Ampleman: Lisa Williams’s “Wing” (Summer 2011 issue—forthcoming) turns us and then turns us again. The first line is the only one-line complete sentence in the poem, and it acts as a sort of thesis for the poem: “People can remove themselves from us.” We are turned immediately, though, warned that death is not the subject at hand, that instead it is “another/ undeniable turning,” the cold shoulder, enacted through the enjambments, which leads us to the edge of a idea and then sends us in another direction. The rhyme of turning/wing/swinging does this, as does the repetition of face; the second time we see the word, it means something else. The poem ends on abstractions, but Williams has prepared us for the counter-thesis of the poem: We are at the mercy of those whose affection we want—and the reader is at the mercy of the poet, who “has the power to move” away from what we expect.