levelheaded: Captains Log: Rest in Peaches

 

The justified lines of Mel Coyle’s “Captains Log: Rest In Peaches” make the poem look tidy. While this format often indicates prose poems, the line breaks here seem too smart to be unintended. In the first lines, Coyle uses enjambment to reveal characteristics of the speaker. She writes: “even when something is good I want to know / when it is over.”

 

The first line suggests that the speaker is someone who cannot accept “when something is good” without grasping for the reason behind it. Line two redefines line one in a number of ways. Maybe the speaker has trouble distinguishing good from bad, or beginnings from endings. Maybe she wants the good to come to an end—an idea supported by the next sentence.

 

Check out the structure of line three. The juxtaposition of the phrase “to go home” alongside “I experience the ‘good death’” makes it seem like the reason that the speaker has said experience is in order to go home. The phrase “I feel it” tacked onto the end of this line informs both the act of going home and of experiencing the “good death.”

 

While Coyle’s use of enjambment slows us down by causing us to consider alternate readings, it also propels the poem forward. Line three melds into line four: “I feel it / is only life.”  The end of line four ushers a clever punch line in line that follows: “my ear out to / sea.”

 

All of the self-exploration of the early lines (seven first-person singular pronouns in five lines) is no accident either. At first I reflects on I’s actions. Then “you picture people talking / about you.” But finally, through the magic of poetry, through sharing and receiving, a connection is made, the pronouns get confused “you / think why am I holding my breath,” and you become someone else.

 

 

– The Editors