Books buried in snow turn into camellias and bald-headed men, and by the end of the poem the reader is asked to untangle a sentence made almost entirely of the word "everyone." Deborah Kohloss gives her poem a title that promises a testament, «The Will of Andre Breton», and it is fair to read that as a nod to Breton, the French writer known as the leading figure of Surrealism. I don't know the circumstances in which the poem was written, so I'll stick to what the text does. It behaves like a will in two senses. It hands something on, and it insists on its own will, its right to make connections that logic wouldn't allow.
The first stanza begins with a situation: books "trapped in the snow." The poem doesn't describe it. It starts changing the books into other things: "camelias / or bald headed men." A camellia is delicate and a bald head is blunt and bare, but both are smooth, rounded shapes against a white background. The list then drifts from objects into ideas: "collected predicaments," "magnificent translations," "a shape / something to remember / and relearn." The movement is from picture to abstraction, as though the snow were slowly wiping away the particular and leaving only a trace of meaning. The word "relearn" matters. The poem seems to suggest that these buried books are a kind of knowledge we once had and must recover.
The second stanza turns from sight to sound, and the images become stranger and more mechanical. Music is "siphoned / through a weather vane," a mixed-up pairing of a liquid process with an instrument for reading wind. Then comes an exact, physical detail: "water will freeze / on the strings of the violin." The next line, "The ice age will sound / silently," is an oxymoron, and the line break leaves "silently" alone on the page, so that the word itself seems to go quiet. Having trapped the books, the poem now reverses itself: "A time will come / when the books fly open." Frozen things thaw, and the books behave like birds.
What follows is the poem's boldest claim, delivered flatly as fact: "mysticism is simply / an extension of / sensuality." The sounds back it up. The s of "mysticism," "simply," and "sensuality" runs through the passage and links spiritual experience to the body at the level of the syllable. The body stays in view with the odd figure who "never left," who "devoured harmony" until "harmony hiccups / rose like pearls / from his oyster belly." The image is comic and grotesque, but it contains something true. A pearl grows out of an irritation inside the oyster, and here a hiccup, an involuntary and faintly embarrassing noise, becomes beauty. The poem seems to prefer art that comes out of the body over art that stays pure and abstract.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no punctuation at all. Its short lines, often two to four words, give each image room to sit alone, and enjambments such as "an extension of / sensuality" make the reader hesitate on the hinge words. Capital letters appear only at the start of sentences in the second stanza, which gives it a slightly more declarative, prophetic tone than the first, with its drifting list.
The final sentence is the hardest and perhaps the most important: "When everyone understands / what everyone else is saying / that is not everyone / understanding / everyone else but / everyone understanding." The wordplay hides a real distinction. People understanding one another one at a time, each translating the other into their own terms, is different from a shared understanding in which no translation is needed. This echoes the "magnificent translations" of the first stanza. Translation is admirable, but it also implies a gap between speakers, and the poem hopes for a time when the gap closes.
The poem is worth reading because it makes the reader do what it describes. The sentences don't resolve neatly, and the images work by association, so understanding has to be assembled instead of received. Whether or not one links that method to Breton, the poem turns its own difficulty into its subject: meaning is something thawed out of the snow, line by line, by the reader.