“Traveler” by Nathaniel Rosenthalis charts a path through quotidian spaces and the emotional atmospheres that are a medium for imbrication and estrangement. The speaker’s laconic delivery emulates the coolness of their setting while meeting a world that feels crisp and excessive—where people are encountered like pressure systems and the weather meets a speaker face to face. The poet’s thinking self appears like an afterthought, reliving a day marked by other people’s bad feeling, and made memorable by the opacity of their intent. Filtered through the speaker’s idiosyncratic empathy, doors and windows seem knowable even as other people do not. The poet ends the day reduced to an avatar, “my close-up,” which is as intimate as a companion yet alien enough to ponder and surveil. And this nearly animate picture is equally the poem itself: reticent yet evocative, “made real through […] shamefastness,” yet no longer in need of it. –The Editors and the Poetry Staff
Tuesday, I went
down steps.
The cold air
un-relates us,
or so I thought.
I wasn’t mishearing
the man at his fence,
going off.
I said nothing.
A one-eyed type.
Some clouds blew
into my face.
I passed, a
best demonstration
of my perennial
disregard, how
hot it was when
he slammed what
a door was, for him.
Into me.
Not being a door, I
could of course
travel. And did:
warm air.
Windows
backed that up.
It was like
I was myself, minus
words.
I thought, Be redundant
to a shamefastness
that you were
made real through.
I eyed my close-up
through the night.