The sea spits him back out at the end
of each long day spent lobstering,
just long enough to sell the day's catch
and fill the house with the smell
of the sea again. Though he showers
and puts on dry jeans and flannel to come
home, when the wood stove warms him,
sea salt leaches out of pores
in his wind‑reddened face.
The sea blurs his vision long after
he closes the door and sits down
to supper‑ a lobster bisque.
It's all he can do to swallow
the soup before his eyes close
and his soft snores cross
the room, the way the sea
crosses the sand and reaches
for our house at high tide.
Who eases into bed beside me
hours later, the lobsterman or the sea?
Previously published in Knocking at the Door: Poems about Approaching the Other, Lisa Sisler and Lea C. Deschenes (Long Beach: Birch Bench Press: 2011.)
Threat of Drowning is that rare poem inspired by a nonfiction text, the memoir A New Kind of Country by Dorothy Gilman, published in 1978. Gilman is best known for her Mrs. Pollifax mysteries.
Mrs. Pollifax provided my introduction to her work, though at the time I didn’t appreciate the indomitable, elderly spy. (After rereading the first in the series recently, I still don’t.) I came to prefer her novels of young women’s adventures in foreign countries, Incident at Badamya and Caravan. When I discovered her memoir with Fawcett’s cover statement that it reveals her real-life odyssey of self-discovery and independence, I knew it would become one of my touchstones for life as a writer.
My poem is based on her description of “The Lobstermen” in Chapter 6. The lobster season in Nova Scotia runs from late November to late May. The fishermen’s lives were hard then, they couldn’t have gotten any easier in the intervening decades. Competition from Russian fishermen and climate change are just two contributing factors. The environment they live in was so foreign to me that I wanted to get closer to it while maintaining a sense of that strangeness.
Threat of Drowning was included in Quince, Rose, Grace of God as part of a group of persona pieces. Several of these represent my attempt to understand the experiences of mature women in the roles of wives and parents. It is also one of the poems I now group together as describing the perils of the sea. When they were included in the manuscript, I was unaware of how often I identified the ocean as an enemy, adversary, competition.
This became something I addressed in an interview I did recently for Only Poems. There I say, I want to convey the ocean’s immense size and ever-changing beauty. It fills the senses with distinctive smells (salt water), sounds (gull cries), touch (grit of sand underfoot), and tastes (salt, always salt). I believe such great natural powers force us to realize how fragile human life is. On the other hand, the size of it can be reassuring and fill me with a sense of peace. Who would you want to ease into bed beside you? The lobsterman or the sea?
Kommentare