Marianne Moore's poem "A Grave," first published in 1921, opens almost casually and disarmingly with the prospect of "Man looking into the sea," and then deepens to consider the grounds of all our human looking:

Man looking into the sea,
taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have
   to it yourself,
it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,
but you cannot stand in the middle of this.

Though the poem goes on to describe the specific scene (in which, for example, "The firs stand in procession, each with an emerald turkey-foot at the top," while on the sea surface, "The wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx – beautiful under networks of foam") and to describe it in terms whose imaginative precision might seem to be the primary reward, its scope is more ambitious than description. The poem chastens our human ambition to "stand in the middle" of whatever it is we see and reminds us that the ocean, like anything else in flux, not only resists our pitiful projections, it swallows them up. The poem concludes not with the man but with "the ocean," which "under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bell-buoys" (those tokens of our human wish to measure and master it), "advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink/ – in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness." The long sentence itself sneakily, perhaps spookily, revises the relation between subject and predicate: The man no longer looks nor takes nor stands; the reader must let herself be dropped into the wavelengths of these phrases and succumb to them as they insist on turning things about.

James McMichael's new book-length poem, Capacity, is also concerned with the grounds of human looking, in ways that seem to pick up and extend the challenge offered by modernist investigations like Moore's. Where to begin? McMichael's account of the genesis of a wave in "Above the Red Deep-Water Clays" (the second of seven parts making up Capacity) offers a scene seemingly empty of the human seer, but the language is haunted, and signs of our perspective are everywhere. Everything we can say reveals our bias, our need to see a thing in our own terms. What other terms, after all, would we have?

                       From a solid
magnetized and very hot core, the earth

suffers itself to be turned outside.
Closest to its heart are the deepest submarine
trenches and sinks. Its lava finds

clefts there in the old uplifted crust,
the ocean floor a scramble. Wrapping at depth huge

shield volcanoes, the North Atlantic

down- and upwells, its denser layers making
room behind them through the blue-green shortest
wavelengths of light. Inside the cubic
yards it levies,
league by league, respiring, budgeting its heat,

it hides its
sameness of composition through and through.

For the normal water level,
an ideal
solitary wave is surplus.

It is worth saying, first of all, that our understanding of the nature of the ocean floor and its relation to wave motion is recent scientific knowledge, acquired in the last few decades. McMichael is ready to look into anything and everything with scientific rigor, and that rigor makes us understand earth and sea in complicated relation to each other, not merely opposed as fixity and flux. Yes, the earth is solid at he core, but it turns itself inside out to flow as lava; the ocean floor itself is both crust and scramble, and the water first moves in relation to the changes in that floor. What does it look like to us? Who is attending to the core of the earth and the ocean's down- and upwellings? We enter into the picture late in the game, after the water's denser layers make room for "wavelengths" of light. It is only when a solitary wave heaves into view that the human erspective emerges. To whom does it matter to consider "an ideal/ solitary wave"? Who calls this place the "North Atlantic," after all? The ocean doesn't name or measure itself. Increasingly, the poem prompts us to consider this oddness as we register the language of "wavelengths of light," and "cubic/ yards." Even the actions of levying, "respiring," "budgeting," and hiding start to seem like human distortions foisted on the natural world. What does it mean to offer objective description if the only terms we have are human terms? Where do we begin to make our difference?

All of James McMichael's book-length poems have concerned themselves with beginning, or returning to a question of origins as an attempt to understand the present moment. "Itinerary," for example, from The Lover's Familiar (1974), "moves eastward across America," as Alan Shapiro described it in his introduction to McMichael's The World at Large: New and Selected Poems, 1971-1996, eastward "and backward in time, beginning with the poet in the Far West and ending with a seventeenth-century New England Puritan walking in his garden." How, the poem wants to know, and makes us ask, did we get here? It is a particularly American question – what did we want to found by traveling here, and what did we find? Where has it gotten us? McMichael's book-length Four Good Things (1980) asks,

Suppose we'd want to memorize the present.
We'd begin with a scenario and follow it
toward ourselves from some one point that's both
beyond us and contained within our past.

More personally framed and focused than "Itinerary," Four Good Things launches itself from Pasadena, McMichael's hometown. Why would we want to memorize the present? What do we want to hold onto, in fact and in consciousness? The poem seeks to understand Pasadena as the vexed outcome of a nation's wish to plan and to make secure – a wish that gets carried to inhumane extremes: To protect us from loss and error, the poem suggests, is to protect us from change and life. This wish resonates with McMichael's own story, born as he is to his particular father and mother – to real estate (his father's job) and cancer (his mother's illness) – or, as we might also say, to the relationship between fixed places and all-ravaging time. But despite the poem's personal focus, its scope is broad. The planning of Pasadena, for example, is not unrelated to, say, the Acts of Enclosure in England. The poem tries to understand how things work, takes apart history and puts it back together the way the speaker as a child takes apart a "#20 New Connecticut grinder," and reassembles it, as a kind of charm against the mysterious workings of things he can't know. Four Good Things offers a hybrid of the American impulse toward historical epic and Wordsworth's Prelude, an account of the growth of the poet's mind, asking in its many and various ways, "Was it for this?"

How does it work? McMichael's third long poem, Each in a Place Apart (1994), seems to retreat from this epic ambition and to assume an even more personal focus than Four Good Things. About the breakup of a marriage, it's told in more or less chronological autobiographical scenes that also investigate how it is things work, how things come apart, how at any moment things could take a different turn, but of course in retrospect, everything seems complete, determinate. Each scene is perfectly poised as a moment before something happens that determines or consolidates a change, a loss. Low-key, almost flat, resistant to the kind of music that in poems or movies tells us what kind of story this is and where we'll go next, how to feel and how to keep on feeling, this poem nevertheless opens up at spooky, vertiginous moments to the larger concerns at stake in exploring this story. Who are we in our bodies? How did we get here?

          Souls. Unconsulted, wet, they're given
breath to, they breathe, there's no time out, they can't work
trades for another's chances, can't sort through their own from
afterwards to write them as they'd have them be.
In the book of all-knowing, the parenthesis
before one's year of birth is there as shield against
the years amassed outside it.

How are our chances determined by the bodies we're born into in place and time? Where to begin? If Four Good Things asks us to think about history, Each in a Place Apart asks Marianne Moore's question, "What Are Years?" and answers, as that poem does, "This is mortality,/ this is eternity."

Capacity inherits and extends the concerns of all McMichael's long poems. Again, he zeroes in on the question of beginning and zooms outward to include multitudes. Each of these long poems has been so peculiarly and remarkably its own thing – in the nature of its voice, its progression, and its scope; positioning itself unlike anything else in contemporary poetry, understanding itself in its own terms – that it is hard to describe them. These poems have no smaller ambition than to understand the nature of human experience in time and space, especially as embodied on a page that commits itself necessarily to both fixity – since it is already written – and flow – since it keeps on going while we read, and then reread. To return, for example, with Capacity to the core, we read that

                                 the earth

suffers itself to be turned outside.
Closest to its heart are the deepest submarine
trenches and sinks.

What has the earth's core to do with suffering, and who cares what is "closest to its heart"?

This is a poetry of luminous impersonality. It is set, again and again, in the cosmos just before we've entered it, and also just after we've left it; and yet there is an intimacy and coolness to it that makes it not unimaginable for the reader to settle into that perspective as if it were a porch left empty in the afternoon. "There's a certain Slant of light,/ Winter Afternoons—" says Emily Dickinson in a tiny poem of cosmic ambition. Her verse offers one kind of lyric precedent for the point of view of Capacity. In fact, if one could imagine Dickinson and Kafka collaborating on a long poem after they had read William Carlos Williams's Paterson, one would be some part of the way toward imagining the focus, ambition, and wonder of Capacity. It's just that our American long poems have always (probably necessarily) been written and inhabited by such big egos and voices; this poem seems nearly egoless, and the trace of attention, not its trumpet. What energy, what urgency, what momentum could build on those precedents? McMichael's gift to the American epic is the voice of time and space encountering and implicating each other on the page, in language that – because it is human – is necessarily haunted and haunting.

One could set Capacity next to Elizabeth Bishop's great poem "In the Waiting Room," which opens out its lyric "I" like a telescope, from the gray waiting room of a dentist's office in Worcester, Massachusetts, through startling pictures in an issue of National Geographic, into volcanoes that threaten to submerge the room itself in wave after wave of lava, while the speaker attempts to locate herself in language on the page – if one were to consider both the dizzying sweep of such a lyric and the modesty of the voice that therein collects itself and concludes:

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

To consider how this poem situates itself in relation to both plain and plainly resonant insides and "Outsides" – how the war is both the World War and the war of the self to recognize and define itself in space and time, in Massachusetts and in 1918 – is to consider something like the virtues of Capacity, except that one would have to add the nearly unthinkable extension of these premises and practices into the long poem. The self is a waiting room, as is the cosmos.

A short lyric tells us – suddenly, luminously, painfully – about who we are as a species of individuals. A short poem, like a chance accident, discovers in us something that we didn't know we knew – and then remembers it for us. Language and the fixed medium of poetry on the page are required, paradoxically, to launch us out of that fixity and language and into our fluid, changing, unspeakable selves. The short lyric thrives on paradoxes its brevity allows it to sustain: "When it comes, the Landscape listens—/ Shadows—hold their breath—/ When it goes, 'tis like the Distance/ On the look of Death—" The long poem, however, gives us not only these moments of launching and fixing (Where to begin? Was it for this?) but also a context in which or out of which such moments must begin to make sense, or music, or both. How do we pay attention over the long haul? How do we take things in?

McMichael's Capacity, like Bishop's "In the Waiting Room," is set in motion by the experience of looking at pictures, in Capacity's case from a book of photographs, The British Countryside in Pictures. These photos, we are told in the last pages of "Back," Capacity's final section, were taken "months only/ before he is born to die." The pictures tremble between the openness of what hasn't happened yet (as in the scenes from Each in a Place Apart) and what has to happen – because they represent what has come to be. And yet Capacity swerves away from the increasingly personal focus of the three preceding long poems. There is no McMichael in this book except as he is implicated in that closing "he." More directly, these pictures reveal the British countryside to be haunted by death – as in, for example, the experience of city children farmed out to the country during the war. And reaching farther back, these pastoral vistas are haunted by the deaths in the potato famine a hundred years earlier. What these photos hold is an invisible history: The deaths aren't here. We value these scenes because of the pleasure they afford, pleasure whose fatal sources the viewer both depends on and seeks to forget:

The British were those whom nature let bring home
as graveclothes to the ones it starved

arboreal and floral plantings.
England was green.

From whose perspective is this poem seen? There is, at times, a dreadful, deadpan irony. How do we understand need? Nature doesn't care, of course. Nor does Time. "Time is\ equable that way," the poem states later, dryly. And the dead want for nothing. Who is responsible for where we are, and where does responsibility begin? What belongs to nature and chance, and what to the human will?

The seven different sections of Capacity explore these questions from a range of frames, until they return in the last to the moment where they began with The British Countryside in Pictures. Where to begin, indeed. "It troubles us," McMichael wrote in Four Good Things, "that we don't quite see to the/ heart of a place." Where do we need to return to understand what might have been at stake in seeing that "England was green"? Where do we stand to look? And what can we stand to see? Despite the fact that proposing such a scheme does violence to our own wondering, moment by moment, as we read where it is we are going, let me propose something like a plot for the book as a whole. It begins, as I have said, with "The British Countryside in Pictures," which composes the world into which the poet is born and presents a mode of seeing that seems to determine that world. It is a world made up of haunted gardens. How do we see the countryside? The poem proposes to revisit the beginning of seeing the land, to leave nothing out. And so it starts again, in "Above the Red Deep-Water Clays," with a wave, and the human wish to fix and mark some one thing seen as separate from the ocean's flux. In "Posited," the poem's third section, we follow the waves until they reach the shore, and the water is named more explicitly in relation to land. The naming of things, we are made to understand, is naming-in-relation, our positing is positing-in-relation:

To say of water that it floods both
forward and back through places
difficult to place demands that the ensouled

themselves make places for their parts of speech,
the predicates arrayed in
front of or behind the stated subject —

water, in the case at hand.

What matters here is the way that "positing" places us in language, which carries us up from the water's edge onto "such things as might be walked on,"

hornblende and
felsite, quartzite, remnant
raised beach platforms, shales,
a cliff-foot scree.

There is no help for it. It becomes impossible to survey the terrain of this poem from on high and to map it out from some consistent distance. The purpose of the poem is to pull you into the process of definition at each stage. Let me say briefly, before revisiting this passage and the processes of beginning, that the titles of the next three sections of Capacity – "From the Home Place," "The Issue of Their Loins," and "The Begotten" – might suggest the rest of the plot. We crawl from the ocean onto land into our home; we define that home over and against what is outside of it, and we engage with others as those we might or might not let in. A plot begins, including some "he" and "she" who might engage each other in colloquy. At issue is possibility and will. At issue is something, and something is begotten, part of which is a wish to imagine one's ancestors, the line that led to this begetting; in "The Begotten," the poem takes the line back to a hungry watcher during the potato famine. The poem explores that individual's capacity to kill – and then a nation's capacity to absorb and obscure that loss in the green of the countryside.

What is lost in my brief account is the poem's painstaking, breathtaking progress, its attention to what begins and how it begins, and its implication of the reader in its course – so it is hard to explain that in its final section, "Back," we find ourselves again considering the origins of looking, considering how "A person/ starts out and lives," how a newborn begins to understand what it sees as separate from itself, and how it understands the position from which it sees as its own. The pictures we view here are the heavy clouds on the low horizon of an illustration in Mother Goose, then a puzzle of "An English Cottage Garden," and back into The British Countryside:

Tucked around that moment back into his
absence in the pictures,

he is reconceived.

His body having not yet
differed from it,

any one scene's plenty is his
death-mask inverted.

Here we are. The book and its sentences have traveled as far from the simply put "England was green" as that involving ocean at the end of "A Grave" had carried us from one "Man looking into the sea." What has changed, of course, is not only the way we look at the land and at nature but the way we look at the past – our relation to Time. The divisions it most devastatingly explores are those between what is possible and what is past; it is interested in what we make of what we are given.

The technique of the poem, then, throughout its progress, is to take us to a threshold and to tremble there, to create a spell of being we inhabit while we read. Again and again, Capacity attends to beginnings of things, to their coming into existence and into our consciousness, attending to these thresholds, the traveling of our understanding from one state to another, from one conception to another. Where to begin? William Carlos Williams, in "By the road to the contagious hospital," the first poem in Spring and All, dramatizes the arrival of spring, zeroing in on the process by which it approaches, the moment in which it begins. He stages this drama in the playing out of the sentences themselves – and this local, technical drama plays a part in the larger drama of the history of poetic techniques. This poem signals one of the many beginnings of the modernist attention to a kind of close reading, an attention to the arrival of the meaning of the poem through its difficult, uncertain articulation on the page. McMichael's poetry, too, asks of us and repays a particular kind of attention to the drama of the sentences themselves. Williams's techniques now seem so familiar, we hardly notice what they accomplish. If we could imagine the reader for whom this kind of reading would have been new, we might imagine something like the challenge of reading Capacity. The slow first half of Williams's poem is built out of seemingly static fragments that stall in slow stanza breaks, in dashes that go nowhere, all weeds and leafless vines, no verbs, no forward movement, nothing is happening – and yet we come to realize retrospectively that this appearance of waste is not waste, this appearance of inaction is not inaction, that true growth and true action depend on this. So much depends upon the synchrony between the scene's coming to life and the sentence's articulation of the mind's attention to that drama as "Lifeless in appearance, sluggish/ dazed spring approaches—." Always off balance, one has to attend to the movement of the poem, moment by moment, enjambment by enjambment. We are made to feel the mind moving forward, tentatively, almost like a physical entity, feeling its way along these lines, attending. They are all about attention:

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wild carrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

"One by one objects are defined." Objects of consciousness, objects of our attention. We remember, are made to remember, that objects are aims as much as they are actual things, and we come to recognize that spring as a beginning is an aim and an objective, and comes into consciousness as such. "It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf." The world is brought dizzily, vertiginously into close-up focus with the gorgeous precision of that naming, to the emergence of the first, particular leaf, its articulation. With this kind of approach in mind, we can revisit Capacity, which holds "such things as might be walked on,"

hornblende and
felsite, quartzite, remnant
raised beach platforms, shales,
a cliff-foot scree.

Again, the poem quickens in the diction itself. We have arrived on land and in our language.

I would like to offer as an example another salient beginning – the moment that might be said to start the colloquy between the "she" and "he" in "From the Home Place." She has tendered a welcome of sorts, and he takes it in. The poem explores the process of listening in terms as scientifically precise as those McMichael used describing the issuing forth from the vents in the ocean's floor, but again the language is unmistakably charged with its human errand:

One does not have to turn to listen.
Airborne at the middle ear,
molecular,
each damped and stronger sound prompts its allied

hair-cell to fire. No more than
a smear at first,
the spell each sound is there for has its

onset and rise,
its temperings whose
play across the membranes no one
other repeats.
Dispersed toward him with the rest from what he

sees of her face,
the silences themselves are telling.

A crucial passage in Four Good Things suggests, "We tell each other things that are only/ starting to make sense." One could understand Capacity as the further exploration of that "telling." What does it mean to start to make sense? And to what extent is making sense dependent on that relationship of each to other? To trace back from this passage in "From the Home Place" to where it started to make sense, we might have to include the passages that move from the growth of a vegetable, for example, to the process, meticulously accounted for, by which a woman swallows some stew and thereby makes of something other than herself a part of herself – which includes not only bodily absorption but also the way that thinking, itself, takes into itself such morsels – and then the way that the thoughts we hold inside ourselves to constitute ourselves might then give way to "colloquy" with some Other. How beautifully, too, the poem wavers on the threshold of speaking, in silent attending. To enter into colloquy is to consign the silent fluid possibility that precedes it into the past; to entertain the present and make nothing more of it than the pleasure of its possibilities is almost all but irresistible.

The consequence of colloquy arrives in "The Issue of Their Loins," Capacity's fifth section, which investigates over some nine or ten pages the process by which an egg is fertilized and develops.

Possibility. The possible.
It lets itself away when it divides.
Until from the sperm's
flagellates at its borders the ovum drinks

into it the decisive
sugar-tipped
one,

it does not sunder toward begetting.

How do we conceive of conception? The egg keeps to itself, then welcomes in the sperm, determines its differentiation. Our will, too, the poem suggests, operates this way. This does not entail some charming projection of human psychology onto the egg, nor some perverse biologification of the will; instead, it attempts to understand the ways we conceive of ourselves in time as made of both chance and choice. Each time we exercise our wills, we define ourselves, and thereby relegate some part of possibility to the past. The poem asks readers to participate in this process, as we follow each sentence, as we take each sentence in – the shapes we think it might cast, and the one we find we have followed.

What are our life sentences? The same reciprocity McMichael explores between love and listener, between land and language, between egg and sperm, between will and "was," is present, too, at the extinguishing of life. In "The Begotten," one starving soul watches the workers on a road crew for a sign that one of them is failing enough to be vulnerable to his attack. It is a crucial threshold:

There was no

hiding from the watcher in those not able
the stare their
eyes put on. He had seen this

change in them,
had caught them being past what it would
take them to stay.

He knows that

welcome would be coming to him soon from

the one dispatched first.
That was the one who would host him,
the one he would kill.

McMichael's poem puts us in the position of Time, and makes us feel our difference in that position. Room for dismay, and also room for wonder. He makes things matter; he makes us take our time.

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