You, Lizard-like
expert at loss, loyal to none,
slip into unknown spaces, claws
digging quickly in, out. You disappear
between things and survive.
Can never go back yet alter course;
are a foreigner in your own company,
who can fade into the dimness of a room
and still be there. Dutiful to darkness.
You hear and seek, see and hide.
Light colours your inner world
as the outer one changes. How quickly
you can flee and shed your skin.
Innocently unfaithful to mate or nest.
LYNNE HJELMGAARD
****
An oblique character study, this week’s poem is attractively mimetic. Its syntax and rhythm are tailored to move in abrupt flickers and flashes, forming an experience of virtual lizard-reality for the reader. Lizards can be large, but the impression here is of smallness as well as swiftness.
Quatrains typically inscribe symmetrical aspirations in a poem. When contemporary writers use them as a containing device, the disruption worrying at the containment becomes a significant factor. These stanzas assert a certain regularity: are all end-stopped, and two, the first and third, favour a third-line caesura. But the unexpected keeps happening: first, for instance, there’s the title, which turns into the subject of the opening sentence, and then there’s the shock of the second stanza’s shorthand, dropping the “you” to begin a sentence with “Can never”. The full stops themselves may behave more like commas. Finally, of course, there’s that odd, solo last line, which has a lingering quality, and seems to represent the shed skin as the lizard finally disappears.
We’re never in doubt that the lizard “persona” hides a human being: the early descriptive phrase “expert at loss” tells us that. But the interest of the poem is that it withholds more detail than it confides about the elusive “you”. This person might be an unfaithful or transient lover, an obsessive traveller, some kind of immigrant or exile, or simply a typical urban human, playing different roles, exploring and discarding images. We are left guessing.
Similarly, the speaker withholds the degree of connection felt with the addressee. At one moment we may fleetingly sense pity, disappointment, admiration or a mixture of such feelings: at another, coolness. The engagement is lizard-like: now we see it, now we don’t.
In the third stanza, the lizard-person’s consciousness is investigated. The opening line – “You hear and seek, see and hide” – invites readers to hone their reflexes to reptilian sharpness. That simple reshuffle of two natural verb-pairings (“see and hear”, “hide and seek”) reproduces in miniature the alertness of a creature that is both predator and potential prey.
The second stanza notes the lizard-persona to be “dutiful to darkness”. This notion of duty introduces an idea of loyalty beyond the self-protective. The third stanza continues the idea of camouflage but brightens the palette, moving away from nocturnal mystery and affiliation. Its references to colour change suggest the chameleon, although, for the poem’s creature, the colour-changes are more than skin-deep: “Light colours your inner world / as the outer one changes”. These are the lines that may attribute to the lizard-person an imaginative life beyond mere survival strategy. Perhaps its cagily elusive movement through the outer world is designed to nourish and protect this inner life. The writer or artist negotiates with crowded social spaces so material may be clandestinely absorbed. It’s possible that the poem holds up a mirror to the creative self.
No real moral judgment is made. The behaviour is watched and noted and finally seen as inevitable, a complex of mechanisms over which the creature has no control. It exists beyond guilt, with no choice but to be “(I)innocently unfaithful to mate or nest”. The poem may or may not be a love poem. It certainly seems underwritten by a calm and graceful refusal to apportion blame.
Lynne Hjelmgaard was born in New York City and has travelled widely: she now lives in London. She has published collections with Redbeck and Shearsman presses, and recently her third full collection, A Boat Called Annalise, a book-length sequence charting her sailing days appeared from Seren.
You, Lizard-like was first published in the anthology Fanfare, edited by Wendy French and Dilys Wood, and published by Second Light.