POET'S CHOICE

neglected, needing nursing -- this man who never showed

me much affection but gave me a knack

for solitude, which has been mostly useful.

This poem confirms that strong emotions are mixed emotions. Poetry can express, with precision, forever unresolved feelings like these.

"Oil & Steel" has 14 lines, like a sonnet. Instead of end rhyme, its lines often conclude with slight, polysyllabic echoes of consonant or vowel: "mausoleum," "television," "fiction," for example. A similar muffled similarity associates the sounds of "Bushmills," "courtroom," "useful." In relation to ambivalence, sonnets traditionally turn after the eighth line, taking a new, sometimes contradictory direction in the final six. "Oil & Steel" does that subtly when, after the father's "Dead is dead," the poem takes a somewhat softer, memorial turn with "I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet."

In another poem, "Self-Portrait With Red Eyes," Cole expresses double feelings with a less traditional structure in 14 lines. A lover's presence and absence correspond to two units divided precisely in the middle -- seven lines about having and seven lines about lacking:

Throughout our affair of eleven years,

disappearing into the pleasure-unto-death

acts I recall now as love and, afterward,

orbiting through the long, deep sleeps

in which memory, motor of everything,

reconstituted itself, I cared nothing about