Before the poem says what it is describing, it hands us a creature. In the first stanza something "crawls out" of the speaker's mind, and the only clue to its identity is tucked into brackets: "Love re-emerging." The poem, dated October 13, 2008, then spends six more stanzas trying to get a good look at the thing. Its central idea surfaces slowly: love, and judging by the final stanzas the writing it prompts, can be watched and described but never held. It slips through the hands that try to grip it.
The construction is the most striking thing about it. Every stanza has five lines, and they alternate between two voices. Lines one, three and five carry the description, at roughly six syllables each. Lines two and four are shorter, roughly five syllables, and always in parentheses, interrupting like second thoughts. Sometimes the brackets are literal revisions: "Or, more artful: heart's," "Less kindly: slithers." We seem to watch the speaker drafting while the poem happens, trying "mind" and then "heart," "slides" and then "slithers." Other brackets are admissions of doubt: "But surely no snake," "Perhaps new-fed full," "Indistinct ending." The speaker never quite trusts the description, which is how it feels to try to say what love is. This makes the title double. "Twisted form" names the creature, but it also names the poem's own shape, which twists between statement and correction.
There is no rhyme. The music comes from sound instead. "Serpentine," "snake," "slides," "slithers," "sleek," "screw-thread spin," "spells," "spiral": a hiss runs through the poem, so the language itself seems to slither.
The creature's body is built from contradictions. It cools "all it touches," so this love is not warm, and its "knotted quiet" is calm but tangled. Its scales are "feathered," blending reptile and bird, and each has "One-thousand facets," as if it were a jewel. It wears a "rainbow-capped smile," which the bracket explains in four words: "My sadness turned round." A smile is a frown inverted, so even the pleasant face is made from grief. That smile leads to "oft-questioned answers," answers that have never settled the questions people keep asking.
In the middle stanzas the anatomy gets stranger. A bulging mid-section "tapers to sleek-lined necks," and the "twin mouths" are "locked in screw-thread spin." Twisting pairs may recall a double helix, though that is my inference, not something the poem says. What the mouths belch up is more revealing: "inky vapor," "a trailing music's script," "spells, spiral hymns." Ink, script and hymns suggest the monster is producing writing. Its music has "Beats, no melody," rhythm without a tune, which is not a bad description of this unrhymed poem itself. The creature seems to be both the feeling and the language the feeling produces.
In the last two stanzas that language turns liquid. It drips as "green ooze," "Clinging, it passes / Through my tightly clutched hands." "Clutched" shows how hard the speaker holds on, and "passes" shows how little that matters. Meaning arrives only "from a distance," to a "reading-drowsy eye" heading "toward sleep's final dream." Is this ordinary bedtime reading, or something about the end of a life? The poem leaves it open, though "Long-ago embarked" hints at a journey begun far back. The understanding comes in a half-asleep state, when the grip has finally loosened.
The poem is worth reading because its form does what its subject does. The brackets show the difficulty of pinning love down, and the hyphenated compounds ("out-in," "up-down," "near-wordless") fuse opposites into single words, as the creature fuses beauty with menace and sadness with a smile. A reader who wants a tidy definition of love will be frustrated. A reader who enjoys watching a mind chase a shape will find something honest here: sometimes we understand a thing by stepping back, not by clutching harder.