OF TIME AND THE LINE
George Burns likes to insist that he always
takes the straight lines; the cigar in his mouth
is a way of leaving space between the
lines for a laugh. He weaves lines together
by means of a picaresque narrative;
not so Henny Youngman, whose lines are strict-
ly paratactic. My father pushed a
line of ladies’ dresses—not down the street
in a pushcart but upstairs in a fact’ry
office. My mother has been more concerned
with her hemline. Chairman Mao put forward
Maoist lines, but that’s been abandoned (most-
ly) for the East-West line of malarkey
so popular in these parts. The prestige
of the iambic line has recently
suffered decline, since it’s no longer so
clear who “I” am, much less who you are. When
making a line, better be double sure
what you’re lining in & what you’re lining
out & which side of the line you’re on; the
world is made up so (Adam didn’t so much
name as delineate). Every poem’s got
a prosodic lining, some of which will
unzip for summer wear. The lines of an
imaginary are inscribed on the
social flesh by the knifepoint of history.
Nowadays, you can often spot a work
of poetry by whether it’s in lines
or no; if it’s in prose, there’s a good chance
it’s a poem. While there is no lesson in
the line more useful than that of the pick-
et line, the line that has caused the most ad-
versity is the bloodline. In Russia
everyone is worried about long lines;
back in the USA, it’s strictly soup-
lines. “Take a chisel to write,” but for an
actor a line’s got to be cued. Or, as
they say in math, it takes two lines to make
an angle but only one lime to make
a Margarita.