Some notes on
Dale Going's
"Services for the Little Hours"
Carol Snow
It is beautiful and we are just beginning to recover from it: linking blessing and injury. The ‘and' a fulcrum between It and it, marking the point of disentanglement/ravelling, healing. This line the closure of a poem (of disclosure) about disclosure. And closure of The View They Arrange, a book which ends not in death but because the book is full.
We couldn't stay distanced or objective watching – was this a failure – / wanting to see what would happen. The speaker of the poem is journalist for one woman's journal, another's art, and her own illness; the entire holding entries, slides/accompaniment, the extremity of radiation treatment.
The men's tongues are jewels and The women's ears are jewels: linked by juxtaposition as neutral as an 'and', proposing no hierarchy. Later in the poem a woman's ear wears (is not) a jewel. The phrase which floats above these, To listen secretly/ to what is said, refers back to notebooks — her notebooks — and forward to another's slides — her slides. Slides taken with the intimate distance of telephoto lens —... She 'eavesdropping' (a hearing and house word) on her neighbors. Earrings, the new earrings, seen in the slides like new overhearings, the jeweled ear both intimate and public.
The blurring disregard of boundaries.
The water which falls in drops from the eaves of a house is distinguished from yet blurs with the view of a visual artist / writer / photographer (she of her slides) as eavesdropper-who-sees (voyeur, ma soeur ) as the 'I' once red with exertion which was nothing at all has read and comments on the text of her notebooks, its passages intimate and public as the newpapers we have espied this 'I' poring over, her sweat raining onto them.
– Thus the poem enters and is entered, we are just beginning to enter it.