2 O’Clock in the Morning, Martha’s Vineyard
The clock at the Old Whaling Church strikes. Edgartown receives a fresh hour. I am an insomniac living in a garret, existing on tangerines and peanut butter. On Sundays I penny whistle the Irish National Anthem. Tonight a nor’easter threatens. The tourists have fled. I remember maples turning red, the burnt smell of dying leaves. Acorns on the scarlet oak. The geese fly south, feathering toward memory lakes over scraps of dialogue on Main Street. The bathroom light comforts me as the wind kicks up. Grape vines grow wild in the Old Burial Ground—they entwine headstones, dangle fruit off marble and stone.
| Kirby Wright |
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levelheaded: 2 O’Clock in the Morning, Martha’s Vineyard
The tone a tin whistle produces is largely contingent upon where the instrument was made. That is, because different manufacturing sites possess different materials and different production methods, a musical note emitted from a whistle made in Factory A may markedly vary from that same note emitted from a whistle made in Factory B.
The title of Kirby Wright’s prose poem immediately situates us. Moreover, the details that spring from this specific time and place, from this specific creative process, give texture to his song.
Readers familiar with Martha’s Vineyard—heck, those of us with a very slow internet connection we’ve robbed from our neighbors—can get a picture of the Old Whaling Church. Even if we choose not to get our google on, courtesy of the familiar pairing of the adjective “old” and the noun “church,” the first line of this poem provides a vivid mental image. The word “Whaling,” here associated with the hunting of giant sea mammals, welcomes its homophone, “wailing.” Pair that with the violence of the sentence’s closing verb, “strikes,” and this simple picture gets a little more complex.
Throughout the poem, Wright’s careful diction creates a blend of vibrancy and dimness, pleasure and pain. An old building announces a “fresh hour.” There’s something charming yet stifling about the thought of “living in a garret, existing on tangerines and peanut butter.” And, while the speaker’s penny whistling boasts a childlike whimsy, the song he plays has rather grim undertones.
Continuing with this strategy of doubling, in one sentence Kirby has his speaker “remember maples turning red, the burnt smell of dying leaves.” Here, as in the poem’s final sentence, beauty and ugliness, life and death, are entwined.
It’s unfair (and inaccurate) however, to read Kirby’s poem as strictly symbolic. “[T]angerines and peanut butter” are, unmistakably, tangerines and peanut butter. The poem is able to emotionally resonate with an audience outside of Martha’s Vineyard because “’nor’easter[s]” really happen in Martha’s Vineyard, because the speaker doesn’t find comfort from some abstract, magestic light, but instead from a “bathroom light.”
– The Editors
