Daywork: Poems

In her third book (following Inmost), Fisher, a former Yale Younger Poet, uses crisp, thoughtful language to ponder what mark we leave on the world. “Wanted to drink until drunk, make an imprint,” she confides, adding, “This is how I came to know you / “as a smudge or trace—thumbprint / on the potsherd, residue in the flask.” But though she’s a committed storyteller (family and friends, castles and coins), can anyone’s whole story ever be retained? Surely art offers some lasting reality, “antiquity’s stone alive,” “the giornata,… / running through the fresco, mark[ing] / where one day’s work ended, the next began.” But for the astute Fisher, it’s not so simple. The fresco’s horse is seen yet doesn’t see; a sketched flame is not itself “alive, hot”; and the painting Slaughter of the Innocents is subject to flood and decay, its “fiction so thin” that, while it seems traitorous not to feel something, “For what? There’s nothing there.” If anything is real, it’s “Violence, [which] is to beauty / as warp is to weft,” and the relentless piecing together of clues exemplified here.