Lock by Matthew Olzmann

"Attached to the body is a life."

Lock

by Matthew Olzmann

To unlock the lock, you offer a key. To insert the key, you offer your hand. To turn the hand you offer your arm, your shoulder, your body. And what is it that’s behind that body? What initiates the motion which, we hope, will extend the arm, rotate the wrist, turn the key, exonerate the lock?  Attached to the body is a life. The life in question follows the body in question like a shadow. Inside a shadow are childhood traumas, interest payments, tension headaches, desire, friends you’ve forgiven, and long walks in the autumn of your memories where the leaves change color and continuously fall but never seem to come to rest on the observable ground. All of this—the arm, the shoulder, the shadow—is contained inside the motion to make the thing turn, to open the thing that’s presently shut. The thing that’s presently shut is a door.  In Ancient Rome, the god of doorways was Janus. All prayers had to pass through him before reaching other gods. Each of those other gods has made the long journey from being real to being mythology. It is painful to be forgotten, to fade from the public record. The old gods are very much like us. We who stand in front of a door, a door that is only now beginning to open.

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Read our interview with Poet of the Week, Matthew Olzmann, in which he discusses how grief is an extension of love and how the process of drafting a poem is a lot like imrov comedy. About the latter, he says:

“I’m actually not able to write “jokes,” but I am able to recognize the potential for humor in various types of incongruity, and over time I’ve learned to trust that more and more. I think it can be a powerful tool for defamiliarizing the contents of a poem or for disrupting a reader’s ability to anticipate what comes next. But the thing I’m most interested in is a type of emotional contrast. Often a second emotion is intensified by being placed next to another.”