Do You Want to Go to Havana
I went snorkeling in the Florida
Keys and forgot a map, just
skimmed over some barracuda
the size of my dining room
table, but didn’t see him
because I was too seasick in
the water. The feeling worse
flipper slipping on a metal ladder.
The feeling gets worse when I want
to go home. So I go further up. An orchard
doesn’t hold tall tress but I
feel worse up there too, but keep
reaching because I see where the
good ones are. Otherwise, who’d
eat them? Birds? Only after
the skin softened into fermented orbs,
the innards a bad tune stuck in your head.
I want to feel grounded again but keep
stepping on magic carpets. They’re
not pleasurable, misinformed examples
of transportation. There are times when
I place a palm to a field to
thank it, for its life and for not
moving, but even fields walk
through countrysides and into forests.
An inch a year is a careful thought
of where to go next. When I text you I’m not sure
you understand my meaning of kinematics.
I say, let’s be gone, barracuda on a plane,
apple on a boat, a wave
in the passenger seat—however
you want to get there.
Amy Sauber |
levelheaded: Do You Want to Go to Havana
No much goes right for the speaker in this poem. Her snorkeling trip is a disaster. Her trip to the orchard is ruined by her fear of heights. Her efforts to experience pleasure end in discomfort and danger. And yet, the speaker is still concerned with “where to go next.”
We all experience unpleasantness, and often unpleasantness isn’t enough to stop us from forging ahead with life. Here, what’s especially interesting is what the speaker leaves unmentioned. There’s more than unpleasantness implicit in the speaker’s experiences. There’s real danger.
Take the snorkeling trip: Yes, she “forgot a map.” Yes, she misses seeing an enormous barracuda because she’s distracted by seasickness. She flails about as she gets back onto the boat, and her seasickness gets worse. She feels awful because she feels awful. But there’s a flipside this bummer of a trip: she didn’t get attacked by a big, unseen, dangerous fish. Her seasickness is miserable, but more importantly, it blinded her to a real threat.
In the orchard, she’s more aware of the danger of falling (she thanks the field “for not / moving”), but falling is not explicitly mentioned. Again, her discomfort – her vertigo, her feeling of “stepping on magic carpets” – conceals the possibility of actually falling out of the tree and breaking her neck.
These omissions represent the way we demote the pain and death in all our actual futures. No matter how carefully we move – even at “An inch a year” – we’re heading somewhere. It’s not that she wants to go to Havana. It’s that Havana is an eventuality. Havana is the future. We don’t know how the trip will go. We don’t know with whom she’ll go. More than experience, more than pleasure, her trips are about potential. They’re about possibility, and in an almost perverse way, they’re hopeful that the trip won’t suck.
– The Editors