The strength of part I lies in the juxtaposition of both the pain and the uplifting excitement the reader often simultaneously experiences. “A Musical Idea,” whose beginning, “At the second light, you turn,” is typical of the many exhilarating poems in part I, in which the reader embarks on a journey of discovery of a past event, jolting from one thought to the next as the subject takes on unexpected dimensions. In this poem, there is also the delight of a childhood game, and of the alliteration of t’s and d’s, as in “…turn, the boy tells me. / I turn… then,” and “Dark end of the day on the street. Dark / late afternoon,” and the alliteration of s’s, as in “down / the lower shelves, takes the stove back / to its fire.”

The strength of part I lies in the juxtaposition of both the pain and the uplifting excitement the reader often simultaneously experiences.

In “Omniscience,” the poet finds that she can’t know too many things because of the paradox that memory is “all about forgetting”: like a “box of odds and ends,” meaning that the past is “a broken mirror,” making memory like fiction, though not in consequence less astounding, as she recalls a serendipitous moment: “…and here I thought // it merely some brilliant bit of the novel / my life was writing.” Sometimes what is known is felt, not understood. In “Seven Aubades for Summer,” adults “protect” themselves from their pain by a “change [of] subject,” and thus “leave the wound” to the child, who is left burdened, “staring down and down.” These accumulated injuries demand our attention. Like a “bird [who] can’t get over his song,”we think over and over our past: “to repeat is to remember.” The poet thinks of her mother’s separation from her father, which the poet was too young to understand: her mother’s “plotting herself out of a marriage,” and subsequent ambivalence, her “splintered look of no and yes,” and the poet’s feeling “emptied.” In contrast to the ambiguity, ambivalence, and unreliability of memory, which has left the poet with a “blurred self,” a “baby… / who dreams without / language, without any past at all,” is able to rest peacefully.

In “The Park in November,” the first line, “could be part rain or part twilight,” follows symantically and syntactially from the title. It is as if the poet cannot bear to separate the present object, as expressed in the title, from its constitutive past, as it is recalled in the poem. A couple sit in a car, “hardly any words / between them,” rain outside, the breath of a sigh frosting the glass as the poet watches this autistic tragedy, asking “why breath / goes white on a window if certain / things cannot be said.”

The final poem in part I is a transition poem, portentious in its allusions to the end of life and presaging the focus of parts II and III on the imminence of death. The poem quickly sets a tone of melancholy:

Death comes along in the guise of a woman who does not look the poet in the eye as she seeks reassurance concerning the value of her existence, “I’ve led a good life, haven’t I? / haven’t I?… / almost screaming,” the rhetorical question futile in its absence of an interlocutor. “Almost” is an important word; the built-up tension reaching unbearable intensity as the poet

The “ticking quiet” is fraught with the possibility of self-disintegration. The poet “feel[s] its rise,” paradoxically at its greatest height struggling with the feeling of fading to nothingness,

A final paradox is that the experience of the unthought known that surged up in the dream, though unsettling, seemed fortuitous, leading the poet to rejoice in hindsight that “this thing / so buried in us … has / any words at all,” and that, “happiness so deeply / surprises.”