In reading “The ‘Change’ in Climate Change” by Jacob Shores-Argüello (Poetry, June 2023), I stiffened attentively at the following:

… Because a year before,
a hurricane reaved its way across this country for the first time
in recorded history…

The country is Costa Rica. “Reaved” looked vaguely familiar; I thought of Faulkner’s The Rievers, a book I know of but haven’t read. I wasn’t sure if it was the same word, nor what it means in either case.

“To reave” is to carry out forays in order to plunder, rob, despoil or purloin. My research revealed that the Faulkner title is spelt The Reivers, and that “to reive” means the same as “to reave.”

Here’s the rest of “The ‘Change” in Climate Change”:

…Tornado or torbellino or something else,
I ask her about the valley’s strange wind. And she laughs, says

that she was calling to ask me the same thing. I don’t know why
I keep forgetting the change in climate change. My grandmother

sighs as the sky darkens to the color of rum. Why I still think
that we’ll have names for all the things that will come.

This straight-talking text pulls what I took at first to be a kind of turn in its final sentence — the reader of Poetry braces for bumps in the road. After I had drafted a catchy paragraph of deconstruction, the climax of which was, “I’m left in a sweet agony of dangling,” my various re-readings caused the penny to drop. My agony was no longer sweet. I had simply read wrong.

The key to grasping the writer’s conclusion is this: The independent clause which is antecedent to the final dependent clause — Why I still think…, etc. — is in the penultimate stanza: I don’t know why…. The last sentence fleshed out is, then, (I don’t know) why I still think / that we’ll have names for all the things that will come.

Once I had snapped to the discontinuity, it was as obvious as the nose on my face. Such are my misadventures with lined speech, given a weakness for skies darkening to the color of rum, forgetting that lucid exposition isn’t coin of the realm in the genre.

No sé por qué aun creo que sabremos darle nombre a todo lo que ha de venir.
Je ne sais pas pourquoi je crois toujours que nous aurons des nombres pour tout-ce qui viendra.

(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved