I waited deep in the water
and gazed up at her on the peak.
Jump, I said. And she plunged.
Her descent was graceless.
She fell tumbling, arms wrapping
her legs and in the moment
when her head struck the surface
I struggled for breath.
Here is where the details become murky.
She must have forgotten that to resist
a fall in water, one must arch one’s back
upon entry and spread the arms wide
as though reaching for support.
When her nose crashed
the bottom it shattered
and blood spooled
through the water.
She lay asleep at the floor of the pool.
I swam to her and carried her up,
raised her over the side to lay
on dry land, pressed her chest
once, twice, to cough out the fluid.
She came to. I saw her nose bent
off-side. Blood coursed over her eye
in a stream. I saw flaws.
2 comments:
I've been mulling this one over since you posted it. I've been trying to think how best to be of some help with it. I think I should begin by telling you what I see.
I think this is the darkest and the angriest piece of writing you've posted yet. I could be wrong of course, that's just how it hit me. It hit me but in the angry way rather than the thought provoking way. To me, that's because the words represent nothing but anger.
I won't say you can't write a poem about something that you're passionately angry about, I've done it myself many times and some of them I think turned out to be some of my best like the one I posted recently, Instructions for Burial.
When I started that one, I was around 20 years old. I only finished writing it last year. Of course, it's a very different piece than the one I first put down. I came across the thing when cleaning up my hard drive and realized it was more like notes for a poem, a skeleton.
I worked through each stanza by writing images that came to mind in response to the stanza. Sometimes all I got were a few words, mostly nouns, some lines though prompted what I thought were very powerful images (the part where I compared her to a dying star for example).
I'm not saying you need to wait almost 30 years to write this and I'm not saying this is nothing but a skeleton, but I am thinking it isn't really the poem yet. I'm saying that if you can get yourself into a peaceful state of mind about this, try reading the piece stanza by stanza and do a reading response as you go. Write down the words and images each stanza provokes in your mind.
Then maybe set your response aside for a day or two and come back to it fresh.
Other things. One reason this piece seems especially angry to me is the lack of any strong emotion in response to the even described. True, you say you held your breath when you saw the way she was falling but where is the horror such a sight would elicit? It seems to me to be more of a journalistic narrative of an event rather than a first person response. For me, this is what makes the piece more like prose than poetry.
"Here is where the details become murky.
She must have forgotten that to resist
a fall in water, one must arch one’s back
upon entry and spread the arms wide
as though reaching for support."
Seems more like a diving coach speaking here. Focused on the technical details of where she went wrong rather than showing any emotion about the accident. That can work too of course by building in some cues that what the speaker is saying is very different from what he's feeling for example but it's a very tricky way to go with this.
The last suggestion I can offer would be to strip this down a bit and see what you wind up with. For example:
"I waited deep
gazing at the diving
platform, a white wall
against the blue
sky. Jump, I said.
She plunged."
Okay, I did a little more than strip it down, I added in my reading response with that one image. (I was a diver on the swim team a very long time ago)
I hope something in this will be of help, Sam. Glad to see you posting regularly again. Thanks.
You had a really unexpected take on this, much different than what I intended. I definitely didn't write this when I was angry.
I've always been intrigued by the way our perceptions influence reality, and what happens those perceptions experience a radical shift. Specifically, the way one's view of another person can cause you to build them up in a way that is wholly different from who they really, and the feelings that occur when you see their "true" character.
I wrote the poem in what I felt was a more objective (cold?) voice as a way of trying to put the speaker inside the reality of the moment when those feelings shift. An "objective" observer if you will. For me, the point of the poem is the paradox that you can THINK you're outside reality, but you never really are.
I'll set this aside for a bit. I agree with you that the language needs to be softened a bit. It reads a bit more harshly than I actually. The idea of doing a reading response on my own poem sounded bizarre at first, but it's not a bad idea. I'll take your advice.
There's a great Joan Baez song called "Fountain of Sorrow" that goes: When you see through love's illusion there lies the danger/And your perfect lover just looks like a perfect fool. That's kind of the sentiment I'm going for. Thanks for the comment!
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