Analysis of "Night Vision" by Kate Colby

 

When I first read the title "Night Vision" I imagined what I would be able to see at night -- like a movie version of what night version could be.  Seeing in the dark.  However, the poem reiterates what happens when you see in the dark, you see the dark.

"Shadows are ideas of / casts them;" The initial two lines create the conceit of the poem of examining the "shadows."  Of course "shadow" has a Jungian allusion, but I feel the poem adds more to this by not addressing the allusion, but what defines the shadow "ideas of what casts them."  The semi-colon at the end shows that the next line is comparable.

"the moon is there to / match but only / on one side." The poem plays with the idea of such a huge image, the moon, being in play, but isn't because the image turns to the dark side of the moon -- again the absence of light.  What was there: ideas and the moon, are tuned deeper in a dark blank side.

Again the poem then adds the space image of the stars and changes them to disappear through another image, "Stars / pick through leaves, / a tree-shaped black space / swallows itself."  Another reference to dark and black but this time through a disappearing imagined shape through leaves. 

All these images of darkness or blackness turns to the speaker in the metaphorical image involving a starfish -- "If I could disgorge my / heart like a star- / fish its stomach I'd / draw you in". With these lines the personal turns a horrific image to something a bit more surreal with the starfish turning out it's heart to take in the other.  This image is not something I easily imagine and if I look it up than it'd be easy to see; but the poem feels like it doesn't demand such check.  The line break to break up the compound word starfish adds a cosmic undertone to the horror, but refocuses the idea of "draw you in," through the break in the language.  How language makes images unimaginable -- make another idea within the line stronger.

The last lines, "but I only have this head and / how I love you looks more like / me than I do" creates an image of the "you" in the last part, but the "you" looks more like the speaker.  But what does the speaker look like.  Who knows.  And I think that's the point.  In all his darkness and absent of light, this recreation of the beginning of the Universe (Genesis and "let there be light[...] moment), the image of of God and man are parallel to this poem, but it doesn't feel like the speaker has a god complex, but more of Williams, "No idea but in things" concept.  If there is darkness then there is no image, no idea until the birth of an idea which is more truth about the speaker than the situation.