Thursday Poetry Post: Out There on a Balcony, She Never Knows What She’s Going to Get

Sitting there writing: inside in the sky’s map

Do you remember when I wrote about Good Emails? Your standard Good Email can originate many places (job application, literary journal, coupon database), but it does not necessarily have to come from a depersonalized entity. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, Good Emails come from your friends. My friend Tara, who receives the Paris Review’s daily poetry email, will sometimes forward it to me. Sometimes it’s just because she knows I’d like the poem; other times, she wants my thoughts on it. There have been a few occasions where I’ve missed her email entirely, and only later, searching my inbox for a link to a sale or information on some chore I need to do, the forwarded poem pops up instead. You know when you try to clean house but you find a craft kit you’d misplaced, so your house is a mess but you learned to needle-felt? It’s that.

Anyway. I had a different poem picked for this week’s newsletter but Tara forwarded me this one so now I’m thinking about it instead.

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Out There on a Balcony, She Never Knows What She’s Going to Get

Lois Hirshkowitz

And there it is all at once a red Russell Stover
Blimp flying north after the plane
That just took off from West Palm Beach
That takes so long to pass
First at the column’s one side then to its other

Far away now the silver-coated almond
The sliver let out of a silk-padded box
Swimming in the sky wings back breast protruding

Gives her a minute to inside it
Sitting there writing: inside in the sky’s map
And, inside the nutty caramel strawberry creams

A lot of physics was going on here
Buoyancy and equality and all
That is and will be displaced

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My affections were immediately caught because Russell Stover, like me, has its roots in Kansas City. Kansas City is the locus of extremely sentimental corporations. Russell Stover. Hallmark. H&R Block.¹ Introducing Russell Stover candy in the very first line of a poem is, for my brain, at least, a magic emotional shortcut. We now have immediate access to every holiday and my entire childhood. Poetry is a computer hacker that knows all your passwords.

Here’s a question I still have. Is the blimp…real? Not, like, is it imagined. Not what I’m asking. It is a blimp, an iconic red oblong blimp floating by, in the real sky? Or is it a red candy (a cherry blimp, say, a type of Russell Stover candy, not to be confused with a Cherry Mash²) being held, physically or emotionally, aloft, put in a place of significance and elevated to aircraft status? I go back and forth. At first I thought it was a cutesy metaphor but now I think it’s an actual blimp. This poem was published in the Winter 2000 issue of The Paris Review, a simpler time when we were all into blimps. Why stick the subject of the poem out on a balcony if you’re not going to let her look at a blimp?

But then the candy imagery and this Forrest Gump-ass title. Sometimes, a blimp is just a blimp. But other times it’s a candy! I like the idea of taking candy very seriously, giving a box of candy its own physics, its own reality and rules. The little line break on the last couplet, the “all/That is and will be displaced,” seems so expansive to me. I know it’s about the blimp. But. It feels like the woman, the she, the subject of the poem, is being displaced in some way, by a box of candy. By something so simple.

And obviously that's the crux of the poem, to tie my brain up like that, to take a blimp with RUSSELL STOVER written on it in cursive and make me imagine something besides a fire risk inside the crinkled ruby foil. The second-to-last stanza seems intent on this, putting us in the box. The word “inside” is repeated three times here. We don’t see that repetition elsewhere in the poem. Here it forces us in – Hirshkowitz scales down from the sky to the interior of a chocolate, squeezing us in too. The whole poem has, to me, a sense of taking place inside the chocolate box. I don’t know about you but I re-use all my Russell Stover boxes. They’re full of ribbons, love notes, craft supplies, treasures. The airplane, with its wings silver like a burrowing beetle, is a little treasure too.

Wernher Krutein via Photovault

When I enter “blimp truther mode,” I fall for the imagery of the blimp taking forever to cross the sky. This part is nearly painful for me, her unit of measurement: “First at the column’s one side then to its other.” I’ve been there – a park, a porch, maybe this imagined balcony – watching something slowly make its way through my forced perspective, using a much-closer landmark as the yardstick to gauge a behemoth that does not know I exist.

I’m left questioning the particular linear grammar of this part: “Gives her a minute to inside it.” What???? How come I can’t make this line make sense, in context or out of it? I do like it, especially when paired with the line that comes after. “Gives her a minute to inside it/Sitting there writing.” Oh, to be a girl on the balcony of a chocolate box, looking across the map of flavors at a shiny blimp. Can anyone tell me what I’m missing on “gives her a minute to inside it?” Did a verb disappear somewhere or am I unimaginative for feeling like I need one?

There’s a good center of gravity (literal/emotional) to this poem. We begin with a heavy phrase, “And there it is all at once.” But we end with a really casual stanza, starting, “A lot of physics was going on here.” What forced the subject of this poem out on a balcony, to think alone with a box of chocolates? A blimp is essentially an overstuffed balloon. It’s considered “lighter than air” because every cubic inch of the interior is stuffed full of super-light helium; the lightness gives it movement but also makes it dangerous, a fire hazard. The poem is the same. I like when things seem that they should be heavy, but aren’t. I like when things seem so sweet they couldn’t be dangerous, but are.

1. And if you don’t think taxes are sentimental, you aren’t documenting your receipts appropriately

2. The far-superior cherry-peanut-chocolate confection with roots in – where else? – Missouri