A Broken Escalator Still Isn't the Stairs by Chuck Carlise

by Chuck Carlise

In the lava flows of Vesuvius and on the slopes of the volcanic range of Oregon, Chuck Carlise maps out the history of personal loss in such evocative detail and with such tender regard for the fragility of the present, that we, too, are caught unaware and overwhelmed by the 'nervous erasure' of grief. What does one unearth from such a Pompeii? Objects of beauty, shards of hope. Obsidian. Paintings on the brothel walls. A bouquet of lace. Reminders of the way in which memory endures. 'An unbroken field of blue.' —D. A. Powell, Kingsley Tuft Award Winner for Poems

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published September 9, 2011

Reviews

[Alie Kloefkorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Chuck Carlisle's chapbook, A Broken Escalator Still Isn't the Stairs, Carlisle very expertly explores the idea of physical space, and the concept of our presence and absence within space. I say expertly, because he intertwines poems of a very individual focus with poems about the larger physical world. For example, placed throughout the collection are poems the reader presumes to be about the narrator's lost love: "For the first few weeks, I can't sleep through the / night. I awake to hear her voice..." (4). These poems are interspersed throughout poems that center on geographic movement of the earth: "Snap a picture of the grasses ahead-- / impossibly green where the trail crosses over" (25).
Though these poems--about love and the earth--may seem to the reader to be separate, to be talking about distinctly different things, Carlisle carefully weaves them into one another. For example, early in the collection appears the following poem:

Heat lightning in the clouds, like camera flashes in all
directions. The air silent & strange. Imagine: your
whole identity built on erasing another's voice (11)

On its own, and if one is reading the collection from the beginning, this poem is about lighting, about a storm, about the crash and the bright light it creates. But later on in the chapbook, this poem appears:

Her voice is still a tiny flash of light--bright enough
to pull my eyes from the road; never lasting long
enough to leave any residue of warmth (20).

Though the poem above doesn't refer to lightning directly, the reader still relates it to the earlier poem: "bright enough to pull my eyes from the road" could imply that lightning strikes while the narrator is driving, and even if that isn't the direct meaning--maybe the voice was bright enough in his mind, jolting him both mentally and physically--it nevertheless speaks to the earlier poem. In addition, both poems are similar in form: they are both prose poems three lines long. These two poems serve as an example of why I consider Carlisle's chapbook to be so expert and well-put-together. He doesn't just use metaphors within one poem, but instead, through association, he creates metaphors across poems, making the collection stronger and his ideas about love and absence and the earth more intertwined.
That brings me to the consideration of how the poems in Carlisle's chapbook are organized. Though the poems on their own might not be considered narrative poems, when put together, I think a narrative is clear. Perhaps certain details remain fuzzy, but the overall journey of the narrator is apparent. For example, besides absence and the earth, Carlisle's poems also focus on this interesting idea of relativity. This idea first jumped out at me when I read the poem on page 19, specifically these lines:

Open water is never actually open water. On a long
enough horizon, there is always rock, dust, root to
hem it in (19)

I read these lines over and over, seeming to innately understand the idea but unable to express it in language to myself. I came to the (hesitant) conclusion that by saying "open water is never actually open water," the narrator is implying that we are never in one space, that space is always broken. Indeed, reading the collection for a second time, this idea cropped up in lines of other poems. Through the collection, space is broken by walls ("To say one is missing is to build walls around air"), by statues ("Statues of the Virgin everywhere"), by windows ("Claustrophobia is a train window fogsmeared with / dust & spores") (14, 26, 28). Keep this idea of broken space in mind.
Also something that contributes to a narrative (which I will outline later) is the location of the narrator. Often times, he is at ground level or below ground, either physically or mentally: "Ocean rolls & twists seven miles beneath us," "All our dynamite and digging, / sloughing away stones," "The square of dry asphalt beneath a parked car," "paintings...unearthed / in Pompeii," "we pass through the tunnel" (7, 9, 12, 24, 28, italics mine). But the last poem is different, in the last poem, something very important occurs, and the narrative is made clear. The following is the poem in its entirety:

The climb takes all morning--rim finally yielding by
noon. White sulfer smoke in the air, singeing & acrid
--a bouquet of lace breezing from dust-dry rock. The
crater is shallower than it seems from below--a shot-
glass of ash & cracked mudstone. The sky at eye-
level. It's all around--an unbroken field of blue.
Impossible to say where it end & the sea begins (31)

Several very important things are happening in this poem. First, the narrator has risen above the ground that he was so often entrenched in throughout the collection; he has risen, climbed to the rim of a crater, both literally and metaphorically. This goes back to the idea of perspective introduced in the first poem. The narrator has changed his perspective, sees things differently (the "crater is shallower than it seems from below").
The poem also goes back to what we discussed earlier about space, and specifically to those few lines in an earlier poem: "open water is never actually open water" (19). In that poem, that is true. But in this last poem, the narrator has reached a space that he describes as completely open and uninterrupted: "an unbroken field of blue" (31, italics mine). He has reached a place where his relativity to other places and objects disappear, because everything is one. He has reached a place of internal singularity as well: the missing woman who was present in so many of the earlier poems has disappeared. This final experience of the narrator--that all is one--is very cleverly alluded to on the cover of the book. If the reader looks closely, the words that overlap the cover art is a dictionary definition of all the possible meanings of the word "one."

[Zachary Austin]

When people suddenly disappear from us, there is a period of reconcilement when nothing seems to make sense. In that gray area, the place between one person and another, Chuck Carlise gives a gentle shape and color to that disorienting readjustment. In his chapbook, A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs, Carlise uses abstraction and repetitive phrases to shape the experience of losing a loved one.
At the beginning of the first poem of his chapbook (all the poems are untitled), Carlise writes, “To say one is missing is to talk of perspective. You / say, she is not with me. You say, he is not where I / want him. There are footprints on the trail, & they / lead somewhere you are nervous to follow,” (3). The poem, and chapbook, begins with a broad statement about life and perspective; Carlise immediately contrasts his broad statement with a specific image of a hiking trail. The subsequent poems reinforce the contrast against the broad abstraction of “To say one is missing is to talk of perspective.”
Carlise confines his subsequent poem to images and feelings that both simple and accessible for the audience, “For the first few weeks, I can’t sleep through the / night. I awake to her voice like a farmer in a / minefield 20 years after the war,” (4). Carlise’s character, the farmer, experiences a schism between reality and perspective that reinforces the perspectivism that Carlise began in the first poem. While Carlise reinforces his belief in perspectivism, he also contrasts against his broad statement by giving a specific instance in which perspective is in play.
The next few poems continue to use different images to reinforce the existence, and value of perspectives, until opens a new section of his chapbook. The seventh poem of the chapbook begins like the first, but from a different perspective, “To say one is missing is to cede responsibility, to create / distance, passive observation. You wake in a room to / men paving the street – smell of tarsmoke &
blacktop. May as well be anywhere,” (8). By using the same beginning to this poem as the first poem, he reinforces the belief that, “To say one is missing is to talk of perspective,” while also progressing the chapbook to a different, more melancholic, plateau. As would seem fit, the poem immediately after visually stimulating, passive, and a little fatalistic, “All our dynamite & digging, / sloughing away stones, while the Earth liquefies & /spreads, cools to blowing dust. Where is Carthage / now?” (9). With contrast similar to the first and second poems, Carlise expounds on the sentiment of passivity and fatalism expressed in his statement, “To say one is missing is to cede responsibility.” The chapbook continues with a similar pattern, Carlise uses new poems that begin with a thesis-like poem beginning with, “To say one is missing,” which is followed by a few visually grounded poems. The continual balance of abstraction and the concrete gives the collection a holistic feel, as does the message Carlise conveys through his book.
While Carlise’s perspective changes and becomes more dynamic, he never quite detaches himself from the fundamental truth, “To say one is missing is to talk of perspective.” Each reformation of, “To say one is missing,” by the very act of reforming a phrase, reinforces the idea that the world, and words, are reliant on context and perspective for meaning.
Perspectivism aside, Carlise builds a narrative of reconciling with losing an important person in your life. The repetition of “To say one is missing,” not only mimics the recurring thoughts about that person, but also propels the reader through something similar to the “five stages of death.”
The narrative is given clear structure and would be immediately apparent to the reader through several mediums. For one, all of the poems have an asterisk above them, and all of the poems remain untitled. The only title in the entire collection is the title of the chapbook, A Broken Escalator Still isn’t the Stairs the implication being that the entire collection was created as one holistic piece of art, not a smattering of thirty different poems. Furthermore, all of the poems are placed, more or less, on the same place on each page, so that the reader can move from one poem to the next without any serious visual adjustment.
Carlise’s collection was created not as one a collection, but as one longer piece of work. The work uses recurring images and repetitive phrasing to give a unified feel to the book, while Carlise also added subtleties to make the reader more whole. Particularly, he used “To say one is missing,” as a thesis-like statement he contrasted with the following images which reinforced the abstraction. Ultimately the chapbook achieves what the chapbook format allows, while also being linguistically accessible to most audiences.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The prose poems that populate Chuck Carlisle’s A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs are terse and evocative. They are deliberate in the way they explore the nuances of subjects we often take little time to consider – memory, identity, and perception. The lens through which Carlisle speaks of these subjects is one constructed from a place of grief, a place mired by the turmoil that plagues the heart of one who has lost one close to him. It isn’t clear whether the woman whom the speaker has lost has severed the bonds of a relationship or has passed on from the physical world, but this ambiguity may be a deliberate attempt to draw parallels between the related states of grief that would follow either loss. Perhaps the statement Carlisle wishes to make within these pages is that the manner of the loss is of no import, but that it is the aftereffects of something gone absent which are of interest to him.
The chapbook begins with a poem in which the speaker is in a state of confusion, trying to decipher the footprints around him that have become “like glyphs” (3). Carlisle writes, “Words bring you no closer to / knowing. Who were you to own these eyes at all?” These poignant lines end the poem with a sort of crisis of identity. The speaker’s world and sense of his place in it has fundamentally altered with the loss of the woman. He realizes that there are times, places, situations, and states of mind that create boundaries, at which language is of little use to cope with or even make intelligible the swirling misunderstanding of the fractured mind. In asking how he was even given ownership of his own eyes, the speaker struggles with an existential conundrum, a loss of grasp on any semblance of rationale behind his existence.
In the coming pages, memories present themselves in many ways – flashes of inner sight, ways of perceiving, and physical objects. The fleeting nature of many of these memories or bursts of feeling from the past is complimented nicely by the abruptness of many of Carlisle’s poems. One prime example of this occurs on page 12, when Carlisle writes, “The square of dry asphalt beneath a parked car in the / rain. More.”. These brief lines make up the entirety of the poem, but it is the shortness of the poem that is able to convey the suddenness with which the speaker is struck by what he has lost. He sees a patch of dry asphalt amidst a downpour and is struck by the lack, the yearning for the “more” that once occupied his life but has vanished. The poem depicts how memory both informs and intertwines with our experience of the physical world in the day to day.
While the physical world acts for the speaker as a source of specter-like memories that materialize and paralyze, it also ultimately becomes the domain in which the speaker can once again find grounding, can once again healthily come to terms with his existence, with the transience of it. On page 19, Carlisle writes, “When the volcano’s shape / darkens from haze to shadow to obsidian & pumice / beach, I am more relieved than I’d expected. The / absoluteness of its presence. The blackness & / sulpher & spit. The utter lack of doubt.”. Here, the volcano becomes reassurance of something firm and lasting, something which cannot disappear in the night. The relief felt by the speaker is an expression of a renewing sense of hope – not that he will no longer be affected by the absence of a woman he loved – but that he can again find stability, centeredness, and perhaps a volcano within himself that remained all along.
The final poem of the chapbook sums up the speaker’s grieving experience on a note that can be read as both optimistic and depressed. After the speaker has climbed to the peak of a volcano, Carlisle writes, “It’s all around – an unbroken field of blue. / Impossible to say where it ends & the sea begins.” (31). In this final poem, the unbroken field of blue represents the yet persisting memories of the loss that color, permeate, and infect every aspect of the speaker’s consciousness. In this sense, the speaker is yet depressed – still wading through a swamp of confusion and sorrow. The speaker cannot tell where this place will end, but the fact that Carlisle implies that the field does end – that at some point the sea will begin – is a decisive spark of hope on which to end the chapbook. The sea represents a returning, as we can extrapolate from the previous poem (“Venice racing / to become the sea again” (30)). Though it is impossible to tell at what point the sea may begin, and though the field presently seems endless, the speaker seems to now intuit that the intensity of this period will wither in time, and that, eventually, life will again feel like a halfway decent idea.

[Johnathon Prather · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs is Chuck Carlise’s meditation on personal loss. The poems can be described as a lot of things: they are prose poems, they are short; they are simple; they are thoughtful. I personally would add that these poems are the stroke of a genius. The poems navigate a delicate balance between philosophical/existential considerations of loss, and our physical and personal experience with it. There is a quiet grief in these poems; listen closely if you want to hear it. Carlise’s ability to write about such a poignant topic without a hint of sentimentality is what makes these poems gold. They are ripe with fascinating images and conjectures. And the poem on page 12: “The square of dry asphalt beneath a parked car in the / rain. More.” I love poetry for lines like that. When the meaning is so open-ended, I become infatuated. This chapbook is a work of art. How else can I conclude this review? After reading A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs, I am convinced that Chuck Carlise is a genius of poetry!