“There Are Eyes Everywhere”: A Review of Oracle Smoke Machine

Oracle Smoke Machine by Christianne Goodwin and Stephen Proski. 34 pages. Staircase Books, 2023. $28.

When I lived abroad at the end of my twenties, I luxuriated in feeling unseen. Across the ocean from the city I’d left, I could be anonymous. It thrilled me that no one in this new place knew what I was doing. But it was a peculiar freedom, tinged with a longing to be known or at least recognized. Having done my homework on culture shock, I’d expected to feel disconnected—but I hadn’t expected to feel unwitnessed. Feeling seen contributed more than I’d realized to my sense of purpose and heft.

Oracle Smoke Machine plumbs the strangeness—the strangerness—of humans’ urge to be both seen and unseen. As the title suggests, opposite forces, or desires, meet in this collection that unites poems by Christianne Goodwin and images by Stephen Proski. A yearning for obscurity doesn’t diminish our simultaneous need to be beheld by an other—and, like the line of waves that forms where bay meets ocean, the friction caused by these connected impulses is at once unsettling and beautiful.

“There are eyes everywhere,” says the speaker of “Ophanim”—a declaration that extends beyond the poem and seems to describe the entire collection. “Avocado halves” lie “fresh like horse eyes” on a banquet table in “The Poisoning”; in “Underpass,” the “Queen of I-90” has “eyes the size of F-150 wheels.” Even poems in which no eyes appear share a preoccupation with looking and being looked at—and Proski’s art supplies a visual vocabulary that invites readers to participate. The artist’s website notes that Proski, who is blind, “addresses their own personal experience of blindness” and seeks to probe “the blurry territory between legibility and illegibility.” The prints in Oracle Smoke Machine ask viewers to enter that territory and consider what seeing really means—as well as when and whether to trust what we see. Each print, combining overlapping images and cut-outs that alternately hide and reveal, draws the reader into the act of parsing shapes that carry traces, seams, and impressions of others. None of the compositions is what it first appears to be.

In the opening poem, “One Night Only!”, an audience in Moscow gathers for “a pre-told visit from / the Devil himself!” That the “single spotlight dangling” accomplishes the same function as an eye isn’t lost on the reader, but in case we had any doubt, Proski’s art gives confirmation. The Devil faces the audience within a yellow circle of light, and his eye—just one, Cyclops-style, a piercing white disk—stares right back at them. This eye offers a challenge, flipping the performance dynamic as the crowd becomes an object of scrutiny. When, in the poem, the figure on stage is revealed and the audience begins to flee, they’re so caught up in the drama of escaping that “no one notices / the Devil’s quiet exit.” So often, these lines suggest, we don’t actually see others. Instead, our gaze seeks only a reflection of ourselves.

In “One Night Only!” the Devil acts in the show knowingly, if not willingly, poised and waiting as the audience filters in. In “Girl #4,” the speaker is a reluctant star. “Someone crowned me,” she says in the poem’s opening line, and as handlers adorn her with rings and ribbons, she adds, “I’d like to unclaim candidacy.” The speaker finds this position exhausting:

What’s this? Only halfway
to the stage, and they’re dragging
dimes from my curls. Too much
tugging, clinking,
I feel myself kick—

The dimes, concrete signifiers of the performance’s transactional nature, indicate that seeing can be a one-sided, self-serving act: it’s the audience that (literally) profits, while the speaker is depleted rather than compensated for being put on display. The disconcerting final image of the wind “rattling the coin slot / wedged between [her] eyes” emphasizes this deprivation of agency and dignity, which begins with the title, where the speaker is identified by a number rather than a name.

The wariness that pervades “Girl #4” recalls “Ophanim,” the second poem in Oracle Smoke Machine. Eyes “[burst] from bark knots and barley hulls” in the “Bull-cold dawn on fallow fields” where the speaker wanders, unable to escape the eyes’ gaze. This eerie imagery harmonizes with Proski’s accompanying landscape, dominated by stark, clean shapes that form five precisely arranged trees and a forest floor made of eyes. At first, I couldn’t identify why the eyes unnerved me—marbled with shades of lavender and teal, they appear bloodshot. But after several readings of the collection, I realized that the whites and the large dark pupils rolled to the top of each eye are superimposed on another image. This ghostly undercarriage is also paired, but on its own, with the poem “Beginner Words.” There, the word POKOL (HELL in Hungarian) hangs suspended above a carnelian fire. The negative space along the top of the page drips into the flames stalactite-like, and when that image is layered under the bark eyes and fallow fields, the marbling feels haunted.

Being intently watched is indeed a hellish experience for the speaker of “Ophanim”: “Miles from home / and wishing [they] were alone,” she and her companion grow “Tired of [the surrounding] irises,” the eyes’ attention so unwelcome that

we picked a thousand eyes,
sowed them in furrows, rolled them off our fingers

until our whimsy grew Ophanim, hover-wings
with blinking eyes. We covered ours, and found

the way home, led by sun-grown guardians. . . .

In the Book of Ezekiel, the prophet interprets his encounter with Ophanim, angelic beings that appear as sparkling wheels “full of eyes,” as “the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD” (Ezekiel 1:18 and 1:28). Goodwin’s “Ophanim” moves from ambivalence toward a similar reverence. Though the speaker’s actions at first seem an attempt at evasion, the picking and sowing of eyes summon the divine—at which point she and her partner relinquish their own ability to see. The nature of the beholders has changed: the eyes bursting from trees and barley are invasive and threatening, but Ophanim exemplify holiness. Being seen by Ophanim comforts the humans: they don’t hesitate to cover their eyes, to cede control, and in this way they find the path home.

“Field Cathedral” extends the thread. “I’m coming to the end / of my visions,” the speaker begins, lamenting that she can no longer access “the warm machines / of foresight.” As the poem proceeds, she parlays her “panic” over this loss into an invitation, asking her beloved, “What do you hope I see?” The speaker’s question is a verbal covering of her eyes, the yielding of sight made explicit in language: she’ll see what he wants her to see. The next poem, “Sunrise,” offers a reason for this yielding. The speaker gathers sea glass in the early morning, then waits in the kitchen for her beloved to wake up and view her treasures:

But you must look at my sea glass
and tell me that it is extraordinary
How else will I know it was all worth it?

This question illuminates its counterpart—“What do you hope I see?”—in “Field Cathedral.” “How else will I know it was all worth it?” asserts that value, for the speaker, doesn’t exist apart from the beloved’s gaze. Only once he sees and judges the sea glass will it become material—and only once the speaker has been seen and validated will she. (That the speaker uses “sea [see] glass” rather than “beach glass” hardly seems coincidental.) Proski’s ability to convey meaning through layering reaches its zenith in the composition on the page opposite “Sunrise.” A collage of various shapes mimics a handful of sea glass shards, at turns iridescent and cloudy. Surrounded by such illusory and shifting lines, the speaker’s longing for confirmation feels warranted, even practical. Unlike in “Ophanim” or “Girl #4,” being seen by an other in these later poems brings relief from the burden of looking for—or at—oneself.

While the meaning of eyes, vision, and the visual shifts through the collection, the spoken or verbal consistently complicates and even occludes. Oracle Smoke Machine is filled with encounters in which reaching across languages causes a series of near-misses. In “Residence Permit,” the expatriate speaker’s interactions with Hungarian bartenders and bureaucrats are closer to question-and-answer sessions than conversations:

Do you want pálinka?
We want two shots of good pálinka!
Is this the good pálinka?

I got a strange letter—
police or government.
I must go to Serbia.
Quietly, at night.

Is this the lawyer’s office?
He calls me blondie.
Does he know I understand?
Here is my passport.

The poem proceeds in halting, terse exchanges, the speaker and her interlocutors no closer to comprehension at the end. The poem that follows, “Russian Lessons,” begins with a lament, a comparison of the sounds made by Russian’s soft adjectival endings with their English equivalents, which are decisively harsher (“Mo-ya / star-sha-ya” versus “outdoor shower / four door”). The comparison disappoints the speaker, who has recently returned to America. Just as the music of Russian is lost in translation, part of her identity is lost in returning to English: she’s not the same person in the two languages, which suggests she’s no longer at home where she was born.

Even without a language barrier, words often fail. In “The Engine,” the speaker probes her feelings for her beloved in writing while riding a train; the motion leads to “visual palpitations” that become “mountains between words.” Ultimately, she arrives at an impasse: “I’m terrified of what I do not feel.” Here, the attempt to communicate with herself, to translate feeling into language, falls short: words can only take her so far. “I’m terrified of what I do not feel” expresses alienation from the self, but even her ability to recognize and articulate that alienation doesn’t bring the speaker any closer to understanding.

That may be all to the good, this collaboration suggests. “The Techno Poem,” which closes Goodwin and Proski’s joint collection, places the unknowable at the precious core of human experience. In a nightclub, the “splattered light from / a mirrored disco duck” recalls the “single spotlight” in “One Night Only!”—but in place of the focused opening beam, the collection ends with refraction. The eyes—of reader, speaker, viewer—are no longer trained on one point or person, but widen to encompass everything. “We have our own horizon / of green laser light,” the speaker declares as day breaks, at last looking outward, ready for whatever’s next. This is the final gesture of Oracle Smoke Machine: releasing the desire for clarity and leaning into the haze.