I Keep My Eyes on the Ground

Your penumbra shimmers with small print
in Papyrus font, clarifications mostly, live-
feed emotional updates, corrections in your
shadow’s margins. Your shadow is a thought

essay typed on the air, erased and re-written
by your every move, proposals stick-scrawled
in the sand as the next wave licks its finger
to flip the beach. For you, honesty is constant

amendment: your stance shifts and new
notes spool out from your feet – footnotes,
revised, a body of dissolving documentation
I try to speed-read fast enough to know you.

Caroline Bird’s poems have a structural density that frees rather than constrains their energy, as Dave Coates remarks in his review of her collection, The Hat-Stand Union. It’s an important foundation for the kind of risk-taking sometimes employed by poets such as John Ashbery. The more trustworthy the basic verbal logic, the more interesting and various the connecting flights a reader is willing to take through uncertain territory.

Her latest collection, In These Days of Prohibition, contains high spirits, humour and fierce sparkle, which sometimes seem distilled from dread. Her personae often dance on sharp emotional ledges, making the measured focus of I Keep My Eyes on the Ground something of an exception. As the penultimate poem in the book’s final section, it draws together the acts of reading and writing, and shows the flux of process essential to them as controllable and pleasurable.

The simplest way to read I Keep My Eyes on the Ground is to trust the narrator to realise the performative promise of her title. S/he is looking at different areas of ground, and being reminded of text, and looking at texts as if they were formations of the ground. The almost-shadow (penumbra) of the opening line need not be interpreted as an astronomical phenomenon. Semitones from the scale of shade occur everywhere light falls.

Direct address creates a listener: “Your penumbra shimmers with small print / in Papyrus font.” Papyrus font is designed to make English text look like mock-cuneiform, and the two words might also be a way of fusing earth and text visually, perhaps with added metaphor. Hieroglyphics, to a non-reader’s eye, evoke threadlike bird prints, tiny sticks and stalks and droplets. If you stare at them intently, such mirages made of letters can “shimmer” on all kinds of humble surfaces – the city pavement, the woodland floor, the seashore.

This is where we arrive in the second stanza, after that mysterious span of metaphor across the stanza break, like a book spine with faded lettering. “Your shadow is a thought // essay typed on the air … ” suggests an at-least-passing aspiration to academic correctness, but the attainment of essay style is swiftly ruffled. The poem’s addressee simply won’t keep still, physically or mentally. “Erased”… “re-written”… “stick-scrawled”, the “proposals” become a more than usually casual game.

The wave that “licks its finger” to “flip the beach” displays a comically unsophisticated approach to reading. And it destroys what was written: it radically alters the beach. There may be a glimpse, here, of Philip Sidney writing “her name upon the strand”, the suggestion of a fully personal “you”. This is reinforced by the later statement about the subject’s “honesty”.

Does the speaker approve of the “live- / feed emotional updates” and the other shifts the addressee allows? The mutability isn’t only physical. The moral core emerges in another pivotal, stanza-crossing thought: “For you, honesty is constant // amendment … ” The poem might not be so neutral towards the revisions and erasures as its calm rhythms and studied metaphors suggest.

Going back to the Papyrus font, the speaker might have already begun to tease the subject. Papyrus has been dubbed “the king of bad fonts”. It’s a little vulgar, like the habit of licking a finger to turn pages. Then there’s the joke about the “notes” that “spool out” from the addressee’s feet to become “footnotes”. The narrator must be smiling at the protagonist here, and perhaps cleverly winding a path between derision and admiration.

So the “ground” comes in and out of focus. It seems increasingly human. The person-as-solid-ground is difficult to read. There are both “clarifications” and “erasures”. The unstable ground may signify the changing self, making necessary adaptations and revisions and refusing a fixed identity. I felt this could be read as a love poem, tempted by Philip Sidney and the ambition of the last line: “I try to speed-read fast enough to know you.” Admittedly, this assertion might also be interpreted negatively or ironically. Speed-reading doesn’t usually deepen understanding. But there might be a kind of subject, text or person, so exquisitely volatile they can be known only by this method.

It’s worth remembering that the title itself might be, or include, a joke. Eyes kept literally on the ground would look upwards, and so we might reverse the poem’s visual field, taking the words “penumbra” and “shadow” into their astronomical reaches after all. The speaker may not want to look up to the person addressed, or may resist the temptation of dazzlement, and enjoy, instead, being calmly and nonjudgmentally amused – grounded, in fact, by the true fidelity of “constant amendment”.