Read quickly, Jim Leftwich's «Antithesis 90» looks like a spill of loose words. Read slowly, it follows a path from the inside of the skull to the outside world. It begins with the brain and ends with war, and the idea that connects them seems to be that a mind is never sealed off from the forces around it. Attention, desire and thought are shaped, interrupted and eventually consumed by larger systems. The title points the same way. An antithesis sets opposites side by side, and the poem keeps pairing things that don't belong together: neurons and economics, a tower and a smudge, a private thought and public violence. The number suggests one piece in a series, but the poem itself gives no more information, so it has to be read on its own terms.
The opening is quick and slightly dizzy. "The brain / on the fly" borrows an everyday idiom for improvising, and it also makes the brain sound like something airborne and hard to catch. Then comes "how many clocks", a question with no question mark. Time is counted in plural, competing units rather than one steady rhythm, which suits a mind juggling several tempos at once. The next stanza, "the border / of the cortex", introduces a word that will matter later. A border belongs to maps and nations as much as to anatomy. The cortex is the brain's outer layer, so the poem has already placed a political idea inside the head.
The third stanza is the strangest and the most revealing. "skyscraper while long / scent / bulb / saying / thing" breaks grammar apart. "Skyscraper while long" doesn't parse, but it does describe what the stanza looks like, because the single words are stacked in a thin vertical column. "Bulb" can mean a lightbulb, the flash of an idea, or the root of a plant. Placed beside "scent," it may also recall the olfactory bulb, the part of the brain that handles smell. That is an inference, but it fits the poem's habit of letting the body and the city share a vocabulary. The stanza ends on "saying / thing", a blunt phrase that sounds like language failing to name what it wants. The speaker reaches for a word and gets only the generic noun.
Then the poem turns to denial: "it is not / capitalism / licking its toes." The negation is odd, because we are told what something is not and are given the picture anyway. Whatever "it" refers to, capitalism now sits in the reader's mind as a creature grooming itself, self-absorbed and faintly ridiculous. The hard k-sounds of "capitalism" and "licking," which echo "clocks" and "cortex" earlier, tie this comic image back to the brain stanzas. The final sentence is the darkest. "As war eats / the desires / of a human blur" begins with a conjunction, as if it were continuing a thought that was never stated. War is the subject doing the eating, and what it consumes is desire itself. "Human blur" turns people into a smear of motion, which recalls "on the fly" and the dizzy speed of the opening.
The form is free verse with no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters. The poem has five stanzas of three, two, five, three and three lines. Lines of one to three beats keep the rhythm jerky, and the one-word lines slow the reader almost to a stop before the next phrase begins. With no full stops, nothing is ever finished, and even the last line just trails off into "blur" instead of closing.
Part of the poem's significance is that it enacts the fragmented, overloaded attention it describes instead of simply commenting on it. It doesn't tell us that modern life scatters the mind. It scatters the syntax and leaves us to assemble the meaning, much as a mind has to assemble sense from clocks, buildings, smells, markets and wars arriving all at once. Its answer to how all of this fits together is never fully given. The poem leaves its reader holding the pieces, between "saying" and "thing."