The title promises music and then immediately damages it. "Octochord" suggests eight strings or eight notes, yet "Loganberry Broken" arrives in brackets like a label on a bruised piece of fruit. The poem that follows runs to thirteen lines, and its numbers never quite add up. There are five architects, one road, and a name given twice. The harmony on offer is already out of tune.
The first half reads like a dream told at speed. "Five nullified architects of industrial Milwaukee" share a city with "Azerbaijan donkeys," and the pairing of "the architect and ass" is half joke, half argument. Order and appetite, blueprint and braying, are "jammed into irrational boxes," then "Freud-washed and unleashed." The verb "washed" is a good choice. It makes psychoanalysis sound like a laundry cycle that cleans nothing and lets everything loose. Saxophones proclaim a "surrealist manifesto at noonday," so the poem knowingly names the style it is imitating and sets it in harsh daylight, not in sleep. Then the tone turns physical. A "fluorescent apology" is vomited "to my spilled intestines." The word "my" is the first sign of a human speaker, and he is being apologised to by a noise he cannot stop, "a broken record."
That phrase shapes the rest. The colon, set apart by a space, opens a quotation, and the register changes completely. The scattered images give way to something like an epitaph: "Here lies the autograph of a minor vaudeville star." The details are small and sad. The star's opening night at the Apollo is "filled with stale jokes and chatter," and "every seat" is "occupied by a former lover." The audience has become a gallery of past mistakes. The room is "an open wound taken by the river of regret." Judging by the imagery, the poem may be circling a failed performer, or a man who sees his own life as a failed performance. It never says so outright, and the shift from "my" intestines to "his" heart leaves the question open.
The poem's strongest effect is a pattern of leaking. Intestines are "spilled," the wound is "open," regret is a "river," and the heart's road "spills into a tar pit." Almost everything in the poem is liquid and escaping, which fits a speaker who cannot contain what he feels. The repeated verb joins the body at the start to the road at the end, so the grotesque opening and the sentimental closing turn out to be the same grief in two disguises.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The lines look like a justified block of prose, and they break in awkward places, on "the," "their," "every," and "a," so the sentence keeps tumbling forward before the reader can pause. The sound is dense and playful. "Courageous and content," "architect and ass," and "Freud-washed and unleashed" all pair words that clash in meaning but chime in sound. The punctuation is rough too. The quotation opens with a spaced colon, and a capitalised "His" follows a comma, as though the speaker had no time to stop and start a new sentence. That roughness suits a voice that is breaking down.
The ending is where the poem becomes more than a clever jumble. "His heart holds a road that spills into a tar pit. The road has been named twice." The final sentence is deliberately puzzling, and it can be read in more than one way. A road with two names might be a path taken twice, or a mistake renamed and repeated. Whichever reading you prefer, the line does what the "broken record" did earlier, because the poem ends by repeating itself. Naming a thing again does not change where it leads, and the tar pit is still at the end.
What makes the poem worth reading is the way it hides sorrow inside nonsense and then lets the sorrow show. The donkeys and saxophones are funny, but the joke is wearing thin by the time we reach the empty theatre of ex-lovers. The poem suggests that absurdity can be a way of avoiding pain, and that the pain tends to turn up anyway, plainly and in the middle of the noise.