Such changeability can make for productive ambiguity: a simple word becomes a portal out of its dictionary definitions and out of logical sense. Such usage resists easy context and linear thinking. In everyday life, one can pick up on a suggestive remark, as when Mae West says, “I used to be Snow White . . . but I drifted.” English literature has its most famous punster in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Literary allusion, of course, expands meaning. And T. S. Eliot’s character Prufrock is full of such references when he admits, “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be . . .”; and when he asks, “Would it have been worth while, / . . . To have squeezed the universe into a ball” (an ironic nod to Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”). Any of these literary moments can suddenly blur one’s vision, then create a leap from point A to points B, C, D. A wayward clarity.

Ambiguity is even more crucial in Japanese poetics. In a haiku, one word can explode the seventeen-syllable economy. Reading the word iro, one moves from the literal meaning color to sexual desire; reading matsu, from pine tree to waiting. In my poem “Constant Objection,” I have the word “object” convey the verb mind and resist, as well as the nouns body, stuff, organism, meaning, purpose, idea, hope, butt, doodad; and in other poems, I use the idioms object lesson, foreign object, constant objection, direct object, object theory. Also in “Constant Objection,” I hope that the phrase “yawning strippers” presents both bored girls as well as the vagina dentata, an image that would be a terrifying and indelible moment for the little boy viewer. In “Object Lessons,” the closure depends on understanding that the noun stay (i.e., a literal plastic collar stay) includes the verb to stay, the sense of a child’s plea, Mother, stay. And from “A Dusting,” the vacuum in the line “The mother lived in a vacuum” must convey the literal vacuum cleaner and a space devoid of matter.

More associative and less pun-like, I hope that the opening line in “Foreign Body”—“This is a poem on my other’s body, / I mean, my mother’s body”—presents a Freudian slip where the speaker means to say mother but, in inadvertently saying other, reveals something compromising. (Had I been a diligent scholar in graduate school, I’d be able to cite William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity.) After all, aren’t word associations the raw material of the psyche, where one rubs up against one’s dreams?

PIVOTING