Sarah Barber

How to Tolerate the Ambiguous

Most of any mushroom is invisible
so you must use what you have learned
about the skull: it is a leaky cup,
a lurking hole. It knows how snakes

are deaf, that the monster on the stairs
below has been waiting for you to notice
there are lots more steps. It reproduces
night—how greatly it adds to our dread—

it transplanted crickets here where
the screen door won’t keep lions out
and behind the window the birds are big
and black. Two suns have risen in the sky.

It looks like our troubles are just beginning
—when you can’t see you you aren’t there. 

A Note on the Poem: “Tolerate the ambiguous” is an instruction in Leigh Patterson’s workbook Moon Lists (2019). Craig Childs notes that “Most of any mushroom is underground, invisible” in “Death-Cap Mushrooms Are Spreading Across North America” in The Atlantic (8 April 2019). “Use what you have learned about the skull” is an instruction for a self-portrait assignment in a drawing course offered by Rachael Marne Jones at St. Lawrence University in fall 2019. Lurking-holes can be found in Rabelais’s Gargantua et Pantagruel (1532-1564). Diane Ackerman reminds us that snakes are deaf in A Natural History of the Senses (1991). Gahan Wilson drew the monsters who wait for us to notice “there’s lots more steps” for The New Yorker (12 July 2004). The idea of “a work which reproduces night” is drawn from Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1568). Edmund Burke observed “how greatly night adds to our dread” in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Emily Dickinson vowed to transplant crickets in her letters. Liana Finck drew the lion lurking behind the screen door for The New Yorker (24 June 2019). Robert Weber drew the huge birds tapping at the window for The New Yorker (5 September 2005). William Steig drew the two suns that signal the beginning of our troubles for The New Yorker (26 August 1967). “When I Can’t See You Are You There?” is a postcard designed by Sean Tejaratchi for Stella Marrs.

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Sarah Barber is author of Country House, winner of the 2017 Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, and The Kissing Party, published in 2010 by the National Poetry Review Press. Her poems appear widely and she teaches at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY.