1

Light from the hallway seeps under the door.
I wear the night over my eye like a patch.

I lock the doors. The walls close in.
The glaciers holler. I can’t hear them.

What’s conceived is barely spoken.
If it gets too dim, call it mist.

I pawned my brain in order to be reasonable.
The claim ticket’s misplaced, not lost.

Inside the old house, thick with musk,
the walls of the matriarch are lined with mink.

2

I arrive at the station. The train is empty,
but cannot accommodate any more passengers.

Snow covers the tracks. A white animal pauses.
A touch my beard and my hands fill with snow.

The child hugs the doll, the doll hugs back;
the child dies of shock and they bury the doll.

The matador pauses before the kill:
there is more to this flourish than show.

Choices bleed into acts: you sit at ringside,
but are no spectator, unless you can keep dry.

3

The perilous instant is blessed: witness the ant
scaling crevices on the butcher block counter.

Another seasonal shift: a pigeon’s trapped
in the airshaft. Continual threat of avalanche.

I keep glancing at the calendar on my watch
wondering why it is so cold if it is nearly spring.

I hear the prisoners were asked to redesign the fortress
for the prevention of suicide in the death cell.

Clusters of galaxies in my coffee cup. One long sip and the rims
are smeared with the flotsam of exhausted stars.

4

No news to report, but yesterday a crack in the sky
became a star on the cheek of heaven.

of an opossum in a death trance baring his pearly fangs at the
    moon.

The simple life eludes me: the autumn sky inside my head
is a sheet of lead, angelic and sinister.

Nightly I watch the same promiscuous commercial in muggy color.
My head throbs. One mistake and a life lost in the making.

To what can the spirit adhere? Old shoes with dirt sticking

…A sentient self emerges clearly in Mark Rudman's work - complex, despairing, seeking to confront the contradictions offered up by contemporary urban life, and to achieve reconciliation with them. The landscape of New York City provides a kind of pulsebeat, especially in the two longest poems in his new book, ''In the Neighboring Cell,'' reprinted from an earlier collection named after it, and ''By Contraries,'' the title poem. The city emerges as a sunless and purgatorial place where injured bodies lie unheeded in busy streets, bums mutter phrases that make eerie sense and twilights fix the city in a moment of magic followed by a moment of terrifying darkness before the lights go on. It is a place of sudden, unwilled encounters and gunshots overheard at odd moments. The ''priceless fossils'' unearthed by a steam shovel provide routine proof of the exhausting mystery of many separate lives: a sack with more holes than burlap, a briefcase strap with ''L.Y.'' intaglioed in gold, a dry, nameless bone, and some words scrawled in red dayglo, on a chunk of broken wall: ''Death has no future.''

The city also is fuel for Mr. Rudman's quirky energy. He has an eye for the absurd, and he can connect unharmonious elements cleanly and swiftly. The noise of the city is in his poems, but Mr. Rudman is also aware that we humans are beset by a kind of urban internal thoughtlessness within ourselves. He avoids commentary by sticking to specifics: the Chief of State speaks of ''acceptable levels of unemployment'' as, in Eisenstein's film, the Captain of the Potemkin looks at a maggoty slab of beef and says ''Those are not maggots'' with the utter calm we attribute only to the ones they never let past the asylum gate once they're in.

Mr. Rudman creates multiple forms within his many long pieces. He alternates short prose passages with poems-within-a-poem, each of which is constructed tightly enough to stand alone as a vignette or lyric. He displays considerable craftsmanship and control over his material as he confronts a complex world with a sensitivity that is acute, subtle and entirely unshielded. He and the city are well matched.

Some poems draw from the landscape of Italian cities, and contemplation of historic ruins and works of art. He imagines himself into and right through painted surfaces; unlike Mr. Corn, he remains aware of ''the brutality of what is missing.'' Ultimately, art serves to link him more forcefully with the world: Looking at Leonardo's drawing made it hurt to look at other people, even a lovely woman moving through the next room. . . . To be alive, then, to see what your eyes are seeing with must by nature be to feel more pain than pleasure.

A third group of poems draws from the Maine seacoast where Mr. Rudman finds, if not an antidote to sensory and emotional bombardment, at least a chance to look deeper into himself through the landscape: ''If we proceed by contraries we keep pace with the waves / breaking on the way in, whispering on the way out.''

''By Contraries'' beautifully balances personal history with a strong social consciousness, inner landscape with outer, offering us a sense of the world and of self we can't help but trust. Mr. Rudman allows us not just to witness, but to borrow his sensibility as it evolves from articulate despair to an easing, a willingness to live with the burden of vision.

Additional Comments on By Contraries

“These poems [By Contraries] are not promises made but promises fulfilled in astonishingly sustained performance.  No living American poet has a better eye and ear for the dialectic of foreground and background, for the concrete particularity of the ‘close-up’ as it reveals and is informed by the metaphysical ‘long shot.’ Mark Rudman is clearly one of our most important poets.”
– William Arrowsmith

"The title poem will, I think, find a lasting place in the canon, as it documents the compulsion of experience generously, forsaking closure for a more difficult truth."
– Donald Revell, Denver Quarterly

"Here is a poetry that has a chance of seeing the world. Mark RUdman is as aliented as the rest of us, but he does not turn toward the private worlds of grief, memory, silence, and the like. Here, happily, is the public poetry of a private person, inheritor but radical transmutor of the legacies of so diverse a pair as Walt Whitman and Robert Lowell."
– Roger Mitchell, The American Book Review