Deep Sea Route 66
Like fish tank gravel, cadmium,
the motel drive pulsed in the neon
pre-dawn and we swam
through thin strings of fog
like fish through plankton, carrying
the baby to the car, cast
in back the diaper bag, secured
the luggage rack.
Flinching like a giant squid,
an early cyclist veered in light cones
from our bathysphere,
and in the corn-fed dusk
a grain elevator loomed ahead, a wreck
in bottom silt, but for its points of light,
conveyor ramp a-tilt.
The nether planes of Nemo’s face glowed
chartreuse in dashboard light
as he craned into the unknown,
eyes wide.
| Casey FitzSimons |
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levelheaded: Deep Sea Route 66
Poems being made up of words, an author’s diction is, quite obviously, essential to any poem. When a poem is an extended metaphor, the challenge of choosing the right words is even more important, and more difficult. In “Deep Sea Route 66,” Casey FitzSimons weaves in double and even triple entendre to create a surprising comparison between driving on an historic highway and exploring the ocean.
Check out all the work that the word “neon” does. It calls to mind the bright fish tank of line one while allowing us to imagine a flickering motel sign in line two. After a smart line break, we learn that the adjective “neon” freshly, accurately modifies the “pre-dawn” of line three. Similar attention to language can be found in other places—“cast / in back the diaper bag”; “a wreck / in bottom silt”—but FitzSimons deserves just as much praise for not over crafting. While bearing authorial touches, the poem is never clubbed to death. And, the all-important “we” of line three reminds us that there is more than poetic prowess at stake here.
Whether or not we want to admit it, if we were alive and living in the U.S. in 2003, when we hear the name Nemo we think of a computer-animated clown fish. If we go back a little further, we might remember that a different Nemo captained the submarine in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. If we’re old enough to remember when Latin was spoken, or if we’re just interested enough in words to look this one up, we’ll find that Nemo means “no man” or “no one.”
Just as the poem’s lone proper noun works on multiple levels, so does its imagery. Visuals like “an early cyclist veered in light cones” and “in the corn-fed dusk / a grain elevator loomed ahead” help ground the poem. At the same time, the cyclist is avoiding something and the grain elevator with its “conveyor ramp a-tilt” seems eager to suck us in. Whether the Nemo referred to in this poem is a car, driver, fish, sea captain, or nobody, the vivid, believable world FitzSimons has created makes him all of us who have ever “craned into the unknown.”
– The Editors
