I know a little something about watching silly old movies late night while making my through a half dozen sloppily made drinks ; there is that smug satisfaction, that blurry clinging to a vague present tense that informs you that only this minute matters, that this giving into cravings, impulses and desires matters, that the ridiculous black and white dramas on the television actually account for something you must pay attention to, blasted though you may be.
Dove has a wonderful way of chipping away at the verbal excess that other poets might be tempted to smother a theme with and thereby kill the idea with a chronic reworking of cliches and tropes about drinking and heroic isolation; rather her language is spare, but not spinal, such as Charles Bukowski's tends to be. She lets the mood thrive, as it were, to define the fluid movement of the character enjoying the very fact that they in a liquid orbit, temporarily liberated from gravity and regret. Everything else in her life is a series of emotions, confrontations and decisions that Come Later.
And I am especially glad that the poem is brief, with this lyric of half-verbalized contemplation refusing to devolve into a wallow or try to make something more of itself by transforming into an absurdly overwrought rant against an unfair chances and bad choices. Our hero is behind enemy lines, inside the experience,aware of what comes after the escape into numbness. It is mock-heroic. One raises a glass to their waning awareness of their own absurdity and then returns to the mood's muddled center.
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