As Ari Banias closes his newest chapbook, A Symmetry, he writes, “Refuse the difference between sameness and difference.” This kind of mystic loop can be found throughout A Symmetry. It doesn’t make sense, does it? How can one not see the difference between sameness and difference? Well, simple. If you are contemplating sameness you must necessarily be looking at two different things that share sameness. If you are contemplating difference the two things must share enough in common to be compared, even if it is only that they exist. It’s a question of balance, of symmetry.
This is just one example of the asymmetric symmetry you can find throughout A Symmetry. Even the title sets up the reader to understand this play — asymmetry buried within a symmetry through the simple addition of a space. And we really can’t ignore Banias’ play with article and noun in the title to form this homonym that echoes antonyms. The mysterious mingling of two mutually exclusive qualities sets us up to expect Banias to be a kind of mystic. He acknowledges this in his poem “Oracle” warning us with the first line, “I was wrong it isn’t. . . .” The playfulness of tenses here is stunning as is so much of the writing in this immaculate book.
A Symmetry is composed of two long poems (“Almanac” and “Qualm”) bookended by two shorter poems (the title poem, “A Symmetry,” and “Oracle”). For the most part these poems take place in or around Greece and all seem to occur within a fairly cohesive and emotionally resonant span of time. The poems are simultaneously intimate and cerebral. In “Almanac” we go from the heat of “I break into my constituent / parts / and in each one I love you” to the coolness of “what isn’t the center of the world / if the world has no center,” the voice leaping across many pages to get there. Banias is our oracle though, shrouding his words in portents, the meanings of which are just beyond the ability of the reader to exhaust.
The key, so often, to opening the puzzle box of meaning in these poems seems to be the reader’s ability to sense not only the symmetry of an image, but also the symmetry of gesture. “[A]ll morning waiting for it to rain / then waiting for it to clear / under a canopy / beside a thick cement pillar” (“Almanac”). The pillar holding up this collection is an understanding that to feel one way and then another is its own kind of symmetry. Another example, is this full-section excerpt from “Almanac”:
at ground level a worker washes
the government building’s
tinted triple-paned glass
his long pole a series of poles
bows under the mophead
odd grace
water splatters the concrete that
satisfying music like the music of rugs
being beaten
of rinsing hot cement with a hose
in the cone of our attention
in a dark green dress and red lipstick
the singer looked pointedly
at someone in the third row
then up to the balcony
and placed her hand on her chest
though manufactured
the glance still electric I felt
first irritation, then pleasure
then following the pleasure irritation again
soapy water in a normal red bucket
the government’s filthy
mopwater
before the
windows gleamed and now
they still gleam
Any gesture has the potential for symmetry in the same way that any number of things — a lone thing, a pair, three things — can be arranged to achieve symmetry. Here, it is the marriage of the singer’s glance with the government worker’s gesture of cleaning that garners my attention. We have mirrored symmetries: mop in water, mop out of water, mop in water; irritation, pleasure, irritation; clean windows, dirty windows, clean windows. And even in the structure of passage we have the symmetry of the man cleaning windows flanking the central gesture of the singer. Each of these “triple-paned” gestures shows the idea of return as a method of balance. These poems are haunted by the looming departure of the speaker as they return to whatever life they live beyond these Greek islands.
This imminent return points to the importance of change and motion in A Symmetry. While visual symmetry is experienced as fixedness, lyric symmetry, as Banias employs it, is kinetic. It is the guarantee of the changing of one thing to another and then, possibly, back again, that achieves lyric symmetry. In this moment from “Almanac,” we see a yearning for the completion of lyric symmetry via return:
to send a video of you to the water
as though the water could receive it
the way you go toward yourself is
a door that keeps opening
But symmetry is sometimes accidental, something to be either noticed or missed:
After being asked for money by five separate people
an office supply truck passes, GIVE SOMETHING BACK across it.
I give five dollars to Ceci.
I gave two dollars to someone earlier, but he seemed disappointed.
In this passage from “Qualm” probably the most narratively legible poem in A Symmetry, we see that symmetry for Banias isn’t something that is exclusively manufactured (though the echoing fives here and the mirrored gesture, the call and response of request and charity, seem to be in purposeful conversation with each other). Instead, chance, at times, presents opportunities for symmetry if we are attuned and open to completing the gesture — if we can pay attention to the portents, to return to our oracular line of thinking.
Banias’ moments spent with gender also hold their own relationship to symmetry:
Yet it’s possible I am
a short bald man. That I am neither
a big-bosomed wide-hipped pretty
nor a short bald man. An antelope, an elk, a deer
on this rug, a twiggy tree.
The genderless squat figure,
solo, blurry, hands on hips, that repeats. (“A Symmetry”)
Banias’ “genderless squat figure” sits solo as a symmetry of gender unto itself. As trans narratives are so often depicted as an inevitable vector from one end of the gender spectrum to the other, a cinematically grand transition seeming to be the only way for trans experience to become understandable or “real,” the subtlety of this depiction lends it power. “Some men are women too, “ he writes in “Oracle,” “the way mountain is land and a harbor is land and a parking lot.”
A Symmetry is one of those rare reading experiences where everything seems perfectly balanced. Every word is set just where it should be, every decision keeps the poems moving forward like some inexhaustible, glowing, golden machine.
Banias closes “Almanac” with these lines that so well embody the landscape of A Symmetry:
I described that portion of sea
and the slope of patient mustard-brown land
destroyed
still living
lunar picked clean
I could see
And now, thanks to these delicately balanced, emotionally intelligent poems, we, too can see so much more clearly lyric symmetry’s contradictory beauty.
[Published by The Song Cave, September 15, 2018. $10.00, 100 copies, limited paperback edition]