PHASES OF THE MOON: Matt Rasmussen’s Fingergun

“Sinking into life while removing itself from this same life, this form of irony is transcendent, a way of being in the world and outside the world at once, trapped in time but also above temporality.” –Eric G. Wilson, Against Happiness



It’s cold in the coffee shop. The doors are splayed open. Water from an indoor fountain spills down a piece of Plexiglas and tricks everyone in the room into thinking we’re somewhere else, somewhere outside. The sky is white-gray like a mouthful of too-large teeth. I’m reading thirteen poems that are breaking my heart.

Now that’s what I call a good day.

Matt Rasmussen’s tiny 2006 chapbook from Kitchen Press is called Fingergun. Its thirteen poems are stark and spare, honest and beautiful. They’re lit by the moon. They’re snowy and milk-soaked. They’re the shiny black of a gun’s barrel. They’re trees that grow hands and hands that morph into guns. They’re time, unstoppable, and nature, impenetrable. They’re hunter and hunted and hunting for answers. They’re the memory of disaster coupled with the knowledge that existence equals violence, that we’re all skittering rats beneath the wheels of the bus.

Bang

If from a fist
you unfold

your forefinger
and thumb,

your hand becomes
a gun.

Like a nucleus with a sense of humor, this tiny poem informs the entire cell of the book. A thesis statement for the book, “Bang,” suggests the irony of hand (and by extension, pen?) as weapon and the linkages between flesh and object. The poems in this chapbook unfold like the thumb and forefinger to reveal the simple inevitability of life.

In “This Place,” hunters lie down in a field. With simple but surprising description, Rasmussen writes,

A boat unzips the river
and on the bank,

the houses are pinned
to their long shadows.
Jabbed through the sky

the moon’s fingertip is
blindly accusing everyone.

We humans are earthbound, pinned to the lives we’re dealt. The moon, above temporality, looking down at us like ants in a colony, doesn’t distinguish between us. We’re all in the same boat, motoring down the same inevitable river. The air knows the kind of answers humans seek in the face of death: “Dawn falls off, but something / has been nailed to the air / telling us we’re wrong. // Our lives turn their noses / into the breeze and bolt.” There’s a kind of crucifixion here, but instead of a Christ emerging from the seeking, an deer bolts across our field of vision: “A boy sprints through birches, / enters a clearing, becomes a deer.” If this boy is a kind of Christ figure, instead of leaving the earth, he embraces it. He is both being in the world and outside the world at once. But this is not a happy poem: the hunters’ hidden gaze foreshadows danger.

“Bullet” follows the trajectory of a bullet as it exits a gun, enters a deer (presumably the boy-deer from “This Place”), exits the deer, and finally lodges into a tree. The bullet’s “peeled-back body // comes to rest in the soft trunk / of a poplar, to stick out // like a button. When I press it, all the leaves fall.” The bullet becomes a button to push, another human mechanism created to order our existence. No longer does it matter that the deer is dead—that’s just part of life—but how we seek cause/effect relationships to explain both power and powerlessness. Push the button, a tree loses all of its leaves. This poem understands how everything is connected: bullet to deer to poplar to human fingers to the poem written about the event.

Rasmussen implicates poetry itself in “The Field at the End of a Poem,” as “the echo of an echo dying,” and the poem’s line as the “warm smoking muzzle” of a gun having burst through the silence of a snow-covered field. This small poem reminds me of that old philosophical riddle, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” If there were no poem, would the echo of something dying still exist? Is an echo enough to mirror reality?

The poems move here from death-as-concept to the heart of the sequence, the speaker’s personal experience of death in, “Dream After Suicide.” The poem details a dream the speaker has after his brother has committed suicide. In the dream, the speaker’s brother stands at the refrigerator drinking milk that pours out of the now-clean bullet hole in his head onto the floor. The speaker recalls,

I wanted to put my finger
into the hole,

feel the smooth channel
he escaped through,
stop the milk
so he could taste it,

but my body held
as if driven into place.
The milk on the floor
reflected the light,

then became it.

The body driven into the floor conjures the houses pinned to their long shadows in “This Place” and the bullet lodged in the tree trunk of “Bullet.” The speaker’s inability to save his brother, to plug the hole so that he can taste the milk, points again to inevitability and powerlessness in the face of death. The milk that becomes light foreshadows a later linkage between the moon (removed from life) and humans (sinking into it). In another poem, Rasmussen writes, “and life degrades us // by forcing us to live.” But amidst the reality of death, can poetry, at least, give us a document of our experience, as “The Field at the End of a Poem” would suggest? Another poem, “Reverse Suicide,” implies in its backwards re-construction of the suicide that language may, in fact, have the power to resurrect the dead.

The bullet-force velocity at which we travel toward death is explored in “Notlove Poem for the Fence at the End of the Field,”

At the end of the field
there is a charged taste in the air

of rust about to take root,
wired barbs set to snag

against a future
that never arrives.

Suddenly and suddenly
wind cuts through the fence,

folds the grass over
revealing a billboard

on the horizon advertising,
Death Beds for Sale:

free.

The last two lines are reminiscent of Hemingway’s famous “short story”: “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” Both point to an unavoidable end. While Hemingway’s lines draw a more specific experience, Rasmussen’s lines bequeath the whole of human history to the page. You can’t buy your way out of death—even if everything is for sale. The moon reminds us of this in “Crosshair,” as it catches the speaker in its sights and pulls the trigger: “the curled finger / of the moon doesn’t // relax.” The accusing finger of the moon morphs into a gun, connecting even it, distant and glowing-round, to the fingergun in a moment of transcendent irony.

You can’t write your way out of dying, either. In “Titled,” Rasmussen struggles with the nature of writing: “The lamp asks, / is it the shadow writing this, // the pen, or their converging? / The paper says nothing.” He addresses the reader, “Please read this and tell me / how much it moved you. // If not at all, please include / with your response, bullets. // Thank you.” THe question is, if my poetry fails, will my life have meant nothing?

The final poem of Fingergun, “O,” answers that question with the violence of geological time. The natural world and the city interweave to become “a remnant of what the glacier / ate before it died” and the speaker asks, “Autumn field, leafless / trees. Why do you look // like the roots of buildings / swallowed by the sky?” In the end, city buildings and country fields conflate, and everything is mowed over and transformed by time. The moon watches the scene again, but this time the moon opens its mouth and says “O.” A letter. A syllable. A word.