Everything in Gail Dusenbery's untitled poem hangs on one small word: "if." The opening line, "If there were another world," promises a sentence that will eventually tell us what follows from the wish, and the poem never delivers it. It keeps describing, clause after clause, until the imagined world fills the page and the condition is left hanging. That refusal to conclude is the poem's central gesture. It is less an argument than a daydream, and what the daydream reveals is longing: for abundance and color, and for a call that someone might answer.
The form suits this. The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter, and its long lines are strung together with semicolons, colons and a steady drip of "and." The syntax piles up the way a fantasy does, each new detail arriving before the last has settled. The second section even begins in lower case, as if the first had never really stopped. Yet the poem is carefully shaped. It opens on tall women waiting behind bougainvilleas and closes on women "waiting, face in hand, behind the opened doors." The marketplace, the patio and the strange sunsets all sit inside that frame of stillness.
The color is saturated almost to excess: orange skies, purple flowers, crimson, violet, pale green. Colors also migrate between senses and images. The orange of the sky returns as the "piles of oranges in the streetstalls," and then as "all the sweet clear acid orange," where color has become taste. "Bloodstone plumage" is a particularly good choice. Bloodstone is a dark green stone flecked with red, so the huge birds already contain the "caged flash of crimson or dark green" that appears a few lines later. The details are exaggerated but not random, and they echo one another.
Sound does as much work as sight. The women have "dark" voices and send "low calls" that are "drifting," and the poem leans on long, soft sounds: "languorous," "succulent silence." That phrase is a small paradox, a silence you could almost taste, and it is full of calling. Against this hush come the birds, whose cries are "jangling," a word used twice. The repetition makes the noise feel as insistent as the women's voices are gentle. The produce list, "mangoes, melons, pineapples," adds a third texture, a rolling run of m's and p's that sounds as plentiful as the fruit looks. The exaggeration is plain too: oranges "piled higher than the houses," birds "bigger than ponies," "several suns setting all at once."
The most interesting tension is between freedom and enclosure. The first birds soar and make "windstorms as they passed." The birds of the second section are canaries, mockingbirds and parrots in a patio, and they are caged. Even the women are always "behind" something: flowers, then lattices, then doors. The barriers loosen as the poem goes on, since the doors at the end are "opened," but nobody walks through them. Judging by these details, the other world is not a place of action. It is a place of suspended desire, where everything is ripe and nothing quite arrives. The pose of "face in hand" can suggest boredom, reverie or expectation, and the poem doesn't choose.
That ambiguity is part of what makes the poem worth reading. It captures how imagining a better world often works: we picture sensory plenty first, and only gradually notice that we have also pictured our own longing, projected onto the scenery. It also invites a sharper question. The women are described from outside, as tall, silent but for their calls, and grouped with the fruit and birds as features of the landscape. We never hear what they want. Whether that is a flaw in the daydream or a deliberate hint that the speaker is looking in from beyond it is left for the reader to decide. Either way, the poem's refusal to finish its "if" leaves the vision glowing and unreachable, which seems to be the point.