‘Aposiopesis [or, The Field Between the Living & the Dead]’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
After several readings of ‘Aposiopesis [or, The Field Between the Living & the Dead],’ a blade-like beauty of a poem by Michael Wasson, I thought, I don’t know how to enter this poem—it’s speaking to me, but I’m not quite sure how. I reread the beginning (“I cannot / tell you how / to begin / but here / is the body”), and I reread the definitions and interpretations of “aposiopesis,” and resaw the poem as a latticework of fragments.
Wasson’s economy of space and rhythm is so masterful here that the points of departure (of fracture, of aposiopesis) are barely noticeable. Here is a meditation on existence, on death and living and the blurring of the two such that the binary fades and a sort of shimmering overlap remains. Deeper still, a melancholy, or perhaps an acceptance, a mindfulness of the unknowable being known in small, fleeting moments.