Constellations

There's a general presumption that rhyme is an affair of

two. Most expected are, of course, end-rhymes in formal

structures—ABAB, etc., but even thinking more loosely,

we still expect that two things rhyme, yet I've been noticing

that, in fact, in contemporary poetry, rhymes often occur in

constellations studded about inside the lines, allowing them

to establish the kind of geometric ricochet that made the

ancients think that they saw animals in the sky. Whistle/vessel/

epistle Scattered across three or four lines—such constellations

create figures that stand out from the ground of the poem,

often doing and saying something quite different from the

poem itself, something that may even contradict it, or may

even contradict itself—anger/anchor/ treasure—revealing reso-

lutions in the poem that might not be otherwise apparent,

such as bird/word/learned/unfurled constellated within a poem

about a family funeral.