I do love me some Defeat and Imagination.

David Berman’s “Imagining Defeat,” published among a compilation of other contemporary works known as Actual Air in 1999, is my choice for this week. I’ve always been partial to contemporary poems, ones that evoke that ethereal, escapist, I-never-thought-of-it-that-way kind of feeling you find in older works, though put into a context and phrase that doesn't require hours of analysis to understand. “Imagining Defeat” is one of these, perhaps more enigmatic and interpretive than some of Berman’s other Actual Air machinations, and goodness, interpretation is such a heavy priority where poetry is concerned.

This rhyme-less, meter-less poem (as is customary with a lot of Berman’s poetry and even the wider contemporary poetic ‘architects’ of today) gives us a reasonably superficial view into an interaction between a man and his wife, or lover, and her leave from his life: “She woke me up at dawn / her suitcase like a little brown dog at her heels / . . . a bus ticket in her hand.” The woman then questions the narrator, asking “If I ever thought of cancer.” Immediately Berman throws us into one of his theatrical tangents. He responds with (or muses on) a sort of polar hypothesis, where cancer wouldn’t matter if it were too far away or so far in the past.

But is this actual cancer we’re thinking of? Maybe we could rationalize this cancer alongside the struggle of a relationship. Looking ahead to the evils of a broken two; remembering those traumas in the future, and wondering which one matters less, or matters more. And even then, we still have to ask why the woman brought this up to begin with. I can venture to guess they’re both aware, though we only hear the narrator and his descriptions, attributing a “dead soul” to the aftermath of the death of a relationship, killed with some kind of festering cancer.

And then the last lines, “Though to believe any of that / You have to accept the premise / That she woke me up at all,” which I interpreted as a leave without explanation, or communication. A woman who packs her things and walks out without affording the luxury of the past of the future to the narrator. The defeat is quiet and undefined, and whether in the far-off or the far-behind, at this point, doesn’t really matter now.