Grid
Do tears power the grid, mackerel and tarpon,
cold electric eel embanked in sludge, do they
flash flood into thirsty mouths. He who taught
the creatures how to live didn’t foresee you.
Mountain peaks divert the winds
while one fire equals blackout, cross and chain,
island stripped to the bone. Like heartache
and heatstroke, dark fluids pool and clot.
Tobacco crumbles in the humid afterwards,
and a chorus of outer voices is stilled,
meaty rasp of saws, churches crammed full,
hospital wards stinking of grief and shit.
Where is Celia Cruz.
Broken dishes of lament sauced by ochre light
shatter under swollen feet. See plastic shoes.
There is one comma too many in the brief.
A shadow grid still pulses through the venous sea,
black sails marking tragedy, hands slapping flies.
The dead keep coming, more and more and more.
Bodies float—hips that swayed,
ears yearning for décimas, that sweet landscape.
Curse the helicopters, heat-seeking gulls,
rising snub above your semaphore.
Mornings, you drink white coffee on a stoop
that lacks a palpable house. It rains even indoors.
The physics of an axe,
hacking wormy wood, apocalyptic rot,
chewed and spat out seeds of fruit.
At last you call to say nada, screw the debt.
and screw your three-star generals.
A horizon of desire has flattened
along the power lines.
| Carol Alexander |
|
levelheaded: Grid
Many of the most vivid images in this poem – “cold electric eel embanked in sludge,” “A shadow grid still pulses through the venous sea,” “It rains even indoors” – seem surreal at first. And they coalesce into a surreal, impossible hellscape. That makes it even more frightening to realize the poem describes the very real, very recent aftermath of hurricanes that devastated parts of the Caribbean. The hellscape is right here in our own hemisphere.
The poem uses the amorphous border between the real and surreal to transcend the regular limits of language. Let’s use the first image as an example. Instead of “mackerel and tarpon, / electric eel embanked in sludge,” the speaker could have said something like, “Dead fish lay in the mud.” That would have been concrete and precise. But it would have lacked the alliterative, assonant poetry of “electric eel embanked.” It would have missed the “flash flood” and “thirsty mouths” that act as signifiers of tragedy. It would have missed tying the “electric” eel to the malfunctioning power grid. And importantly, it would have misrepresented the presumed, then undermined, impossibility of the scene.
The language of power – “the grid,” “blackout,” “pulses,” “power lines” – courses through the poem, drawing attention to itself as a central theme. The poem is insistent about the connections it draws. This works in tandem with the poem’s sometimes explicit self-consciousness. In a poem full of commas, she says, “There is one comma too many in the brief.” When the speaker says, “Where is Celia Cruz,” she presents a larger question on the purpose of art in an acutely dangerous crisis. Celia Cruz can’t help the people on the island. How, then, can this poem possibly help?
But for all its complexity, the poem resists floating off into something otherworldly. The poem is tied to real events, which the speaker makes clear when she refers to Celia Cruz or when she imagines corpses “yearning for décimas.” And it’s most clear at the end, when someone says, “nada, screw the debt. / and screw your three-star generals.” In that last example, it seems she is at least tangentially referring to recovery efforts in Puerto Rico, but even in these specific moments, the poem is interested in the uses and boundaries of language. There’s power in poetry, but there’s also power in screaming into the phone at the top your lungs.
– The Editors
