Mary Jo Salter - Mr. X

By the time you’re forty, you’ve met so many people
their features fall in place as little bits
from other people, like the Identi-Kits
that victims piece together with the police.
The felon is memory, which takes a face
and slices up what once was very simple.
People you loved, the waiter you saw every week
without seeing, arresting strangers re-assemble
years later in other faces and belong
convincingly there, as if they were unique,
and innocent of how they make you tremble
with remembering or forgetting. I was wrong,
Mr. X—whose cheekbones I recall
from somewhere, and that funny, slightly cross-
eyed, quizzical look you shot me on the sole
occasion we met—to assume you must have lost
someone who looked like me. And yet I stared
longingly at you, as you disappeared.

I already mentioned this on the CWC Substack in my September recap, but fall is my favorite season. I’m prone to birthday blues, so I’ve never really cared for winter. And despite my Caribbean blood, I absolutely melt in the summer. As a result, I’ve gravitated towards the equinoxes, and specifically the autumn. I love the cold mornings and the slow encroachment of dark in the evenings. It really gives me a reflective vibe that leans appreciative rather than existentially destructive. Maybe that’s why I found myself thinking of this poem’s opening line and subsequently searching for my copy of Mary Jo Salter’s 1999 A Kiss in Space so I could properly remember how it looked on the page.

I love that the opening line is like midlife as aftermath, with that “so” really emphasizing the over-exposure aspect. I’ll take this moment to say that when reading a Salter poem, if you plan to mark it up, it’s best to have a few copies. She always has so much layering going on that you’ll inevitably run out of space. There will be so much I could talk about here, but it would become somewhat chaotic, so in the pursuit of clarity I’ll ignore some things that I would otherwise want to focus on. But because I obviously can’t help myself, I’ll give an example. The poem opens up with this super trochaic falling rhythm: “By the time you’re forty, you’ve met so many people.” Because it’s the exact opposite of out preferred talking rhythm, the line feels kind of exasperated. Like fucking hell, I have met so many damn people. Maybe I’ve met too many people. Is it even special anymore? You ever see how excited a 5 year old is to meet a new friend? When’s the last time I got that excited to meet someone? … See, this is what the autumn does to me. In any case, this stress rhythm play is all over this poem.

What I will bring attention to is the texture that Salter creates through the combo of fricatives and plosives. Read it again slowly and let your mouth play with the leaking air fricatives like the f and v sounds. At the same time, really punch in those plosive p and b sounds. Hopefully, you will notice just how lively Salter has made this collection of just 47 words. For comparison, up until this word, you’ve read 74 in this paragraph, and there isn’t anywhere near the level of music and rhythm. The result is a stanza that flows so well you’ve got to go back a couple of times to slow down and process what the speaker is actually telling us. As if that wasn’t enough, we’ve got people←→simple, bits←→kits and police←→face. Effortless intentionality makes for the best poetry.

“The felon is memory, which takes a face/ and slices up what once was very simple” is just too good a line to not take a second to enjoy. Though the stanza began with almost a passive forgetting as the features “fall into place,” it ends with this active action of memory to dissect and violently disassemble. There is an agency in the actions of our memory, or the lack of that memory. As someone who can remember a seemingly limitless amount of the most trivial knowledge but cannot tell you exactly what I ate for dinner last night (I’m not even kidding — I’m trying and drawing a complete fucking blank), I understand the implication of action in selective memory.

The second stanza pivots sonically towards sibilance and transitioning towards short e sounds in its final lines. It also shifts from distant to human. There is love there alongside trepidation and connection. That feeling when you stare too long at someone who you think you may know or have known but you can’t tell from their expression whether they share the same feeling or think you are a complete psycho for staring at them. You’re holding their features up against the countless eyes, noses and chins of your memory to see if this is some sort of artifact of exposure or legitimate recollection. Salter does this very clever switch in the last two lines of the stanza. “and innocent of how they make you tremble/ with remembering or forgetting.” Those short e’s gently tap the brakes on the line and bring it to a natural conclusion before the stanza’s end. It makes the “I was wrong” feel even more unexpected and poignant. And again, week←→unique, re-assemble←→tremble, belong←→wrong. These end rhymes are so much cleaner than the first stanza and as a result they feel smoother and more “right.” These lines are about creation and compilation, compared to the destruction earlier in the poem.

The final stanza tucks desire inside recognition and gives an erotic charge to resemblance. It’s not some absurd Craigslist NYC missed-connection circa 1999; it’s a sort of love by pattern. Ok, actually maybe it is sort of like a Craigslist missed connection from back in the day, but still. The speaker shields herself with humility when she assumes the man she is looking at must be recognizing someone else in her. It can’t simply be her that he is looking at. It must be that patchwork of his past. Sibilance again in this final stanza, but it is punctuated by l sounds that drag out tongues and our minds in the process. The enjambment of the penultimate line extends out the longing and embodies the verb. The stare is maintained and unwavering until it is cut off by the disappearance of the other. The scene this poem is describing occurs in matter of seconds when you catch the eyes of someone across the room or on a train somewhere, and that brief flare of passion seems to come from somewhere deep inside and is gone just as quickly. Salter takes that moment and unpacks an entire universe of the human experience.