Poet's Choice

the muscles under the teeth and jaw

disintegrate down to the chest

That is death that

the flame goes on rotting

in the windless bony dusk

The last phrase is no longer a bas relief standing out, polished, "rather good," above the smooth ground. It is desolate. Anger watches it. Fear drains it. Spirit is already gone from it. It is an afterwards, not an apex. Nothing follows.

This exquisite self-consciousness rises far beyond the merely literary. The poem considers the resemblances among various kinds of absence: sunless streets, lost ideas, unwritten poems, death itself. The tone is not melodramatic. The feeling of "It is an afterwards, not an apex" and "Nothing follows" is analytical though not dispassionate. There is even a hint of satisfaction, a suggestion of the aesthetic principle that "nothing follows" because nothing needs to be added. The word for that tone of voice, weighing its own formulations along with their object, is "reflective." Mary Kinzie's achievement is to make the reflective into something lyrical, as well.

Robert Pinsky's most recent book of poetry is "Gulf Music."

(Mary Kinzie's poem "Lost Poems Like" is from her book "California Sorrow: Poems." Knopf. Copyright ¿ 2007 by Mary Kinzie.)