In the CR office, we get to know our volunteers pretty well. There are the weekly meetings, of course, and also we require every volunteer to put in office hours. This is largely so there’s someone for Matt M. to wrestle; someone who’ll salivate when Lisa heats up her leftovers from home; someone to act blinded when Becky walks in wearing her blaze-yellow coat; someone to say, “I’m a peach person, myself,” when Matt O. polls the office on which fruits are favored, which frowned upon; and someone to scribble notes when Nicola holds forth from her doorway on the best way to get a tick to disengage so the mouth parts don’t get trapped in your epidermis and cause a nasty local infection at least and at worst transmit some icky ticky disease (she grew up in the woods; she also fed a lot of chickens, but that’s a post for another day).
At any rate, volunteer Joe Dargue was, at first, a bit of a cipher. A quiet type. Tall, but not too tall. Slender, but not excessively so. Mysterious and blond at once. He wrestled, salivated, went blind on cue, and scribbled raptly as required—all with the genial air of a tolerant go-along guy. Then . . . one day . . . Joe said no. He said it pleasantly, quietly, but with an unmistakable undertone of steel. Joe’s no was a no in its very essence. Negativity in its purest form. We all recognized it. Matt M. stopped practicing head-locks, Lisa stopped blowing on her spoonful of delicious homemade chili, Becky stopped twirling around in her brightly fashionable coat, Matt O. stopped pondering his pear, and Nicola . . . Nicola realized something. She realized that you can ask Joe to write a few paragraphs about a poem, no problem a-tall, but you can’t ask him to do data entry.
Joseph Dargue: Every once in a while, you’ll stumble across a poem that makes your heart beat faster, your lungs ache. Laura Eve Engel’s “Reciprocity” does just that. In fact, the poem anticipates and encourages this kind of visceral reaction in its fragmentary description of the dissolution of a relationship. This is the reciprocity not of building but of breakdown.
The momentum of the poem is realized through the simple power of anaphora and rhetorical questions, which also create a sense of endlessness and circularity (lacking question marks, the lines carry a foregone feeling of futility). Every line begins with “And” and contains the twice repeated “who”: the partners in the poem inflicting and experiencing reciprocal and escalating kinds of pain on each other. With the termination of each line, a new, slightly more unsettling aspect of their entanglement is brought to bear. We move from “who shields who from the shadow’s big tree” to “who sends who to the bottom of a sweet drink” in a mere ten lines. This is not a poem of compromise; it’s downhill all the way.
At the end of the poem, a barrage of repetition blurs the distinction between the unhappy lovers. We, nor the speaker for that matter, can tell where one ends and the other begins. The reciprocity has been reduced to tears and confusion. The last line—“who cries for who and who cries for who”—is wrenching to say the least.
