“We’re sad in our own country”: David Dodd Lee’s The Nervous Filaments

            David Dodd Lee, The Nervous Filaments
                 Four Way Books, 2010. Paperback, 90 pp, $15.95.


and those aren’t real horses

something peeled
down to speechless wood

duck after duck moving across the sealed windows

it happens even
while she’s washing your hair…
                    (from “Heart-Shaped Recovery Poem”)

       So we are thrown into the world of David Dodd Lee’s The Nervous Filaments. This collection reads very much like a memory of some long forgotten, nonexistent place that we so desperately want to (re)discover. It is a melancholic remembering, an evolutionary ache, that unexplainable and universal feeling we wake up with each morning.
       Lee plays on our collective emotions in The Nervous Filaments, evoking in us a sense of something we knew in a previous life, always bringing us back to this mysterious, and often eerie, “she” who haunts the entire collection. “She” is washing your hair, “and then she’s under you, / smelling of sheetrock, stained by antibiotics” (“The Seventies”), until suddenly “she” is searching your palm for a lifeline (“Tachycardia”). Whoever “she” is, she moves from poem to poem, graceful and terrifying. Her placement within the collection helps ground the reader in Lee’s world because “she” acts as the guide, leading us through the anxious verse that would be completely unknowable without her. Strangely, “she” herself is unknowable, a series of contradictions, the sometimes-lover, the sometimes-monster, the constant ghost at our side: in her we find a piece of ourselves. We become her, if only for a line or two, and thus we become part of the story, no longer mere readers but actors in this strange and nervous world. 
       Even when “she” is not directly mentioned in a poem, her presence is felt nonetheless. Take, for instance, the title poem, “Nervous Filaments.” The “she” is nowhere to be found in this poem, but there is the feeling of her between the lines and Lee can’t seem to escape her enigmatic influence: 

slight successive modifications 
you put on the blood. 

       “She” can be savage, even grotesque, an evil kind of ghost that pushes you to the dark side. Yet later, “she” is pure romance, hiding between the sheets in a room where “there was sun shining all over the bed that beautiful morning.” 
       Many of the most remarkable moments in The Nervous Filamentsoccur in the silence on the page, the white space left so carefully between the lines. Lee never writes more than three lines without a stanza break, but most often, each line remains on its own, carrying a tremendous amount of significance: 

trees film over with ice in the middle of summer 
her hair keeps flying out of her open mouth 
an owl dies on its branch 
                    (from “Who But I, O Reckless Death”)

       Here again is Lee’s mysterious “she,” with hair flying unnaturally out of her mouth. Without pausing to explain, Lee moves on, taking a moment of silence before announcing the owl’s death. It is difficult to conceive of any real narrative in this collection, and such peculiar, juxtaposed lines separated by breaks lead the reader to wonder what strange land we are traversing. 
       From line to line, it feels as though we have traveled miles and are surprised by what we discover next, an unanticipated moment that somehow feels familiar, as in déjà vu, or a dream. In the silence between each line, the reader is forced to pause for an extraordinary amount of time, considering the weight of the line and where Lee might take us next. Perhaps sometimes overly dramatic, the effect is nonetheless memorable and speaks to the reader provocatively. Lee whispers to us about his anxiety, his terror, his love—in short, his human condition: “It’s a secret, / the blackness” (“Who But I, O Reckless Death”), a secret each of us keeps. 
       Lee’s sparse use of punctuation instructs the reader how to read the poems: quickly, breathlessly, each line ending in a pause more final than a period. It makes the lines read simultaneously fast and slow, so that the reader is rushing to the end of a line only to be halted abruptly. Lee is again using absence to make a statement. What’s more, the lack of punctuation—or very little punctuation—is well suited to Lee’s controlled hysteria, a prevalent theme throughout the book. In the first poem, we are introduced to the narrator’s mood: 

I could see the ambulance spelled
backwards
I could see the eels spilling out of the horse’s head
                    (from “Loveless, The Gravel”). 

The anxiety here is not overt. The narrator calmly tells us about the ambulance, the eels. Upon rereading these lines, however, the controlled voice reveals itself to be dangerously on edge. The imagery employed—ambulance, eels, horse’s head—create a scene bordering on horror. And what’s truly horrifying about these poems is their acceptance of this state of being. Arguably, Lee is reflecting the post-9/11 anxiety hidden in all of us, that collective moment that keeps repeating itself in our subconscious, 

the doors keep 
accumulating… 

we’re sad in our own country. 
                    (from “Porcelain”) 

       Adding to our growing feeling of anxiety is Lee’s use of water as a motif throughout the collection. Like a wave crashing over you again and again, Lee uses water in all its varied forms—rain, snow, ice, fog—to thrust the reader underwater with him, not only as an audience but also as part of the drowning. Lee pulls us through this watery, anxiety-filled landscape, and there is no dry land for the weary. “The room bright in deep water” (“The Seventies”), we are amongst clouds, “two boats, two boys” (“Who But I, O Reckless Death”), snow and rain and a “daydream of water” where “the drought finally never came” (“Contract Pleasure”). 
       Such repetitive imagery casts the reader fully into the collection. We are oriented by the disorientation, realizing that we are fully part of Lee’s anxious world whether we want to be or not. It’s always snowing again in his poems, always raining softly. In this underwater world, everything is murky, including the narrator’s own understanding of himself. We find ourselves in a place as strange as it is familiar, so much like the terror-fueled world in which we wake up daily, performing our routines of controlled chaos. Indeed, “who wouldn’t have a nervous breakdown” (“The Pyramids”)?