Poetspeak: a self-reflection
by SMITH BROWNE
| Poem: | The Nature of Water | |
| Published in: | Obsessed With Pipework, #28 |
The Nature of Water is the product of loss. It comes from being misplaced and losing my place. Losing my grip on the almost-already-there thing. In the end, as with so many poems, it is about one of the many species of desire, wanting that which you cannot have.
During the summer of 2003, I lost a child I was carrying. Then in the autumn, I lost another. There's the old humorous adage that goes: To lose one is a shame; to lose two is careless …
I knew that one day I would end up writing about this loss and the care-less-ness of the body at odds with desire. I just didn't know how it would come about. Unlike some very talented artists, I could never make good poetry out of life's bad things by sheer force of craft. I knew I would have to wait until I was smiled upon by some gods or muses or something. So I let it all go and did not write, and got on with living.
In spring of the following year I know the feelings of the egg alone in water came to mind while driving. I live in the UK and (don't tell the authorities, but) I still drive on my US license. There I am shifting gears, wanting nothing more in life than an automatic car. There I am on the 'wrong' side of the road, wanting nothing less ridiculous than to be 'right'. Then a car ahead of me in the road manoeuvres backward, reversing around a corner and out of my sight. Now, please email me if you got your drivers' license in NY State in the 1980s, but didn't that used to be illegal?
All manner of differences came to mind, reminding me yet again that I was a stranger on these roads, in these parts, in the rain coming down and -- when the hyperbolia of big emotions take hold -- in the world, the universe, the whatever before the Big Bang banged. You get my drift. Small things get you thinking cosmically.
Ah, a metaphor! Did I just say I was a 'stranger on these roads'? A little on the clichéd side, but I can work with it: it's raining, so 'stranger/roads' easily slide to the fluid, to 'fish/water', more precisely 'out of water'. But not just any kind of not-belonging or being reminded of foreignness would do. My mind rattled about for another image, and the boiling egg was there. Me/alone. Rain/water. Mind/rattling inside the confines of an unfamiliar metal container. I began to see an egg in a stainless steel pot jangling on the bottom as the boiling begins.
The rest grew from there.
I did not know the poem was about the miscarriages (which I made singular to keep the imagery focused) until after I wrote what would become line 3: it conceives of lifetimes unlived. Until that line came, I thought I was going to write about being uncomfortable driving on British roads. But poems often have other ideas for us. When the boiling water became a lullaby of waves, the words any woman associates with losing an almost-child, the words of hospital, family and friends, come back. Their words are inevitable; they truly are sorry for your loss. But those phrases, those commonplaces, are horrifying. Horrible and horrifying, because the reason for their being spoken is utterly common.
I just focused on the solitary egg boiling and the morbid banality of knowing that, like so many many many before, it was not-almost-born for this.
Smith Browne was born in Jamaica,
raised in the US,
and now resides in England.
Her poetry is nurtured on all three Englishes.