Balm by Christian Wiman The heart, it hoards —KEVIN YOUNG “The poems are a balm,” the poet said, whose ear endured, besides the natural atrophy of any unearned gift, history, mastery, and all the mosquito demons of email and oil changes, underlings and overlords, afternoons of disappointment and self-taste too heavy and humid to move. “Amid it all,” the poet wrote, meaning loves, meaning deaths, meaning the lack of meaning infiltrating even heart and hoard, love and death, “the poems are a balm”—meaning, in ancient days, a substance fragrant, resinous, effective, for a time, against decay.
That final definition of balm changes the whole poem: not a cure, not protection from loss, but something fragrant and effective, for a time, against decay. It makes the claim for poetry smaller than salvation and, because of that, far more convincing.
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