Big Sur
The sea is apathetic today.
The gulls are listless.
There is violence in the tides
and in the hot brittle shrubs.
I had my ideas about this place.
I pictured a great release.
But that isn’t how this works.
The wind has thousands of years
of erosion experience and I’ve
been here ten minutes.
These golden poppies birthed their first
bright buds centuries
before my family had a name,
before any sisters were lost,
before my brother tromped
the pavement of a sun-cracked
California street, a gallon of milk
slapping his skinny thigh,
his chapped lips grinning,
the milk cool as stone. No,
there is no great release
save for the bitter quick one
that spins all bodies into salt, salt
into open sea.
| Kirsten Abel |
|
levelheaded: Big Sur
This poem’s speaker sets us up with dual perspective on nature. First, we’re shown the “apathetic” sea and the “listless” gulls. We’re shown a natural world born of purposeless lethargy. We can imagine an idle day, lounging at the shore. But when the poem’s apathy is pegged to the “violence in the tides,” the gulls’ listlessness starts to seem like practiced stoicism. Nature may not care about us, but in all its not-caring, it will bash our skulls against the sea wall.
The poem’s central thought is found in the lines, “The wind has thousands of years / of erosion experience and I’ve / been here ten minutes.” On one level, the speaker is concerned with her smallness in the shadow of enormity. With a sense of humor, the speaker compares her own experience to the power of the age-old wind, which she recognizes can reshape the earth. On another level, she pleads for the wind to change her, to give her the “great release” she seeks. If the wind has been at this for thousands of years, how long could it take to eat the emotional crust away from one person?
And what about that emotional crust? It is wonderfully ambiguous, tough it mostly seems tied to family. There’s the family’s “name,” which signals a sort of clannish quality to the family. There’s the lost sister (or sisters), which feels tragic and mysterious. Then there’s the peculiar image of the speaker’s brother walking up the street with a jug of milk. It is a private image. It seems we are meant to know that it is heavy with meaning, but we are not meant to have an idea of what it could mean.
But her point is not the importance of her own small circumstances. Instead, her point is the impossibility of an external solution. However big, however beautiful, however meaningful a scene, “No,” the speaker says, “there is no great release.” The speaker “had ideas about this place.” She “pictured” it in a certain way. She brings her baggage to the edge of land and expects mother nature to carry it off for her. But she discovers even the apathy we attribute to nature is too much. Nature can’t be apathetic or listless or violent because nature just is. The only great release is “bitter quick” death, the body’s ultimate way of yielding to nature’s clarifying influence.
– The Editors
