678
PARTISAN REVIEW
Repeated 'words or phrases come to represent the repeated behavior for
which the speaker is punished or punishes himself. "Bad boy, you'll learn
your lesson-" the boy tells the rabbit he is torturing in "Other Hands" ; in
"The Riddle," the boy hears his mother "saying / over and over that he's a
bad boy" and makes his toy soldier "run / again like punishment against her,
and again be punished / over and over for the bad thing he is about to do."
Such obsession is externalized in "Neighbors" -a sequence of ten poems
about a young couple living upstairs from a disturbed woman who repeatedly
plays the same record. The music expressing this woman's unfulfilled desires,
violates the optimism of the couple, upon whom the neighbor spies as they
kiss goodbye in the morning and to whom she listens as they make love at
night. Living her desperate, messy life, this neighbor with her song of ideal
desire comes to epitomize the very problems of maintaining a love relation–
ship, while the couple, "the nice people no one / would look twice at on the
street" become through their counter-voyeurism implicated in both the hu–
manity and the madness of their neighbor:
the way she wildly looked around
when the car lights slashed across
her chafed arms, her wet nightgown,
her suffering unhoused, exposed
to anybody's eyes. And we thought about
our urge to go on watching.
Neither sentimental nor judgmental, Shapiro plays skillfully on the sor–
did delusions and desirous expectations ofcontemporary America.
The dangers of such obsessions (compulsive drinking, compulsive buy–
ing) within a marriage lies at the center of Shapiro's strongest poems, even
in
the lovely "Blue Vase," in which the speaker attempts to commence a hap–
pier relationship for himself. Observing his partner as she sews their bed–
room curtains, the speaker takes stock of his possessions, including the "small
blue vase my ex-wife left / behind so many months ago." He realizes, am–
bivalently, that he has arrived fully into the present. Yet the last lines suggest
how he will struggle to keep his new life amid these beautiful things beyond
the range of his obsessions; he helplessly holds "the plentiful bright cloth
above the floor / it grazes now, no matter what I do."
Like Shapiro, Timothy Steele uses the ordering of language to contain
the uncontrollable forces of emotional life. For Steele, though, the measured
line is the basis ofbeauty, and aesthetic sensibility a presence as powerful as
other people. In "From a Rooftop," the view leads the poet at dawn to con–
template beneath him the serene orderliness of the city, apparently empty of
