Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Frederick Nims’ "Parallax at Djebel-Muta" is an intricate meditation on time, perception, and the intersection of past and present. The poem’s title signals its preoccupation with shifting perspectives—“parallax” refers to the apparent displacement of objects when viewed from different vantage points, a fitting metaphor for how the poem moves between temporal layers. Djebel-Muta, likely an imagined or loosely historical Middle Eastern site, becomes a setting where the boundaries between the ancient and the modern dissolve. The poem oscillates between the present discovery of an ancient tomb and a reconstructed vision of the lives once housed within it, presenting history as simultaneously distant and immediate, as if time itself is a trick of sight.

The poem opens with a solitary figure, a modern traveler or archaeologist, strolling along desert cliffs at sunset. The description of his long shadow choppy over sands introduces an early fragmentation of form, suggesting an unstable relationship between observer and environment. The sudden shift in physical stability—Look out!—propels the figure into literal and symbolic descent, as he falls into a forgotten tomb. The moment is rendered with cinematic urgency, his body like a floored boxer (groggy) his low head, an image that conveys both disorientation and the dazed recognition of something profound. This accidental fall into the past—his numb knees and hands meeting ancient remains—immediately collapses centuries into a single moment.

As the flashlight flickers to life, the scene is illuminated not just physically but imaginatively, transforming dust and fragments into artifacts of lost grandeur. The remains—a boy and girl, their skulls fractured, their jewelry still clinging to their bones—hint at violent death, yet their presence is softened by the rich detail of cinnamon, cassia, clove pouring from the girl’s skull like hourglass sand. The mention of the hourglass reinforces the poem’s central tension: time is both measurable and elusive, its passage irreversible yet continuously repeating in the cyclical nature of history. The juxtaposition of decay with the lingering traces of beauty—the curl of cheek, lotus lagoons tanned—suggests that even in ruin, remnants of vitality persist.

The poem’s midpoint performs its parallax shift: Gazed enough? Now: come over here and look. The imperative signals a demand to change perspective, to see the hourglass not as a symbol of loss but of inexhaustible spring. Where decay seemed final, the scene is suddenly revitalized. The tomb’s past is reconstructed before the reader’s eyes: a sunlit Egypt where a chariot speeds along the cliffs, its riders laughing, clothed in green pleats, their bodies bronzed by the desert sun. The male figure, falcon-eyed, suggests nobility or warrior status, while the woman’s Nile-green eyes and golden throat suggest both sensuality and royal distinction. Their physicality is palpable, their vitality a stark contrast to their skeletal remains. This reversal of time—where the dead rise, restored by poetic imagination—imbues the poem with a powerful sense of longing, a wish to bridge the irreconcilable gap between past and present.

Yet even in this reconstructed past, there is the awareness of transience. The ancient couple’s language is inscribed in hawks looking hard at you, baboons and ships, / Snakes, fishes, bitterns, bees, the crescent moon—the hieroglyphic script that encoded their world into permanence. But permanence, the poem suggests, is an illusion; the haggard hipbones’ pillowy sand serves as a grim reminder that flesh eventually succumbs to dust, no matter how beautifully it was once adorned. The past remains visible, but only in fragments, requiring an act of imagination to complete its story.

The poem’s final moment brings the parallax full circle, merging both timelines. The living past meets the ghost of the future in a spectral encounter: a rickety skeleton, gold-circled eyes emerges, his skull wide and barren, his left arm leathered to some moldy gold. This figure, ambiguous in its significance, could represent the future of the laughing charioteer or the remains of another long-lost individual. The skeleton’s chrome rod—perhaps a staff or scepter—suggests that whatever distinction once defined him is now absurdly irrelevant. He doddered off, harmless and forgotten, while the youthful riders, still ignorant of their fate, clattered madcap over the hill, whistling.

This closing image is devastating in its dramatic irony. The lovers ride off, as if escaping mortality, yet the reader knows their journey has already ended in the bones unearthed at the poem’s start. The modern traveler, kneeling in the dust, becomes a mirror of their future, as they once were of his present. The poem thus resolves its parallax with a final haunting realization: time is not linear, nor is it completely knowable. The same space can hold both joy and ruin, and history is nothing but a series of lives momentarily illuminated before vanishing into the dust again.

Nims’ use of shifting perspectives, precise imagery, and an almost cinematic oscillation between discovery and memory creates a poem of profound resonance. "Parallax at Djebel-Muta" is both an archaeological excavation and a poetic excavation, unearthing not just bones but the ephemeral nature of existence itself.

Copyright (c) 2025 PoetryExplorer

Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!

Other Poems of Interest...