sol(ace) song

Lately, everything seems to be falling apart. The first time I encountered Evie Shockley’s “sol(ace) song,” the force of that feeling hitched me to the title’s beginning. I read it as a word of comfort dissolving into a pair of lonelinesses: “sol” evoking solitude, “ace” conjuring the image of a card with a single mark on it. But at the heart of the poem, a note of caution stops me, and I wonder: Have I become one of the “one too many ones tuned to their / own inward music”? Pausing to reattune, I find routes that I’d missed: the calming windings of the indented tercets, the recurrence of the long “a” sound (“shade,” “day,” “shaped”) that opens my mouth wide when I read it aloud, as if to sing. Newly alive to the poem’s music, I hear possibility even in “contain” and “unable.” Now I see that “sol” is also the sun—as in “the sound of sun drifting / or driving down through // oak, willow, sycamore”—and “ace” is a beloved one, held by the parentheses’ embrace.

“Is there a way to think about distance that aligns it with difference but doesn’t necessarily align with separation?” the scholar and poet Fred Moten asks. Maybe this is what a song does. Rhythm invites company, an attunement that doesn’t require sameness or the pretense of total transparency. The poem’s final line is a dedication to someone called, simply, “l.” The intimacy is not wholly legible to me, but I can feel its warmth.

– Claire Schwartz