Manhattan Ave
Though the reality of other women excited you, fantasies
about them made you feel excluded.
So I came up with scenarios
involving other men. Me, bruised from knots.
Me, over a railing.
One night, as we were walking to dinner,
I had the fantasy I knew I couldn’t say.
The avenue was dark, a man lay dead or alive
near the marble fountain.
A fog-horn went off in the harbor
and seemed to go on forever, pulsing,
moving closer through the dense, grey night.
The poor ships, I thought, but
nothing could shake the water from my brain.
Cars swam along under the street lamps.
I glided beside you as though roped, my body
displacing the light.
In your eyes I believed I could see
the birches and mild lakes of my childhood.
The challenge of wet surfaces. Cold sedge.
And for the first time I loved this city, though I knew
you would leave me
alone in it. Knew exactly when, and for whom.
| Catherine Pond |
|
levelheaded: Manhattan Ave
In its first four lines, this poem sets up a fully realized (and ultimately malfunctioning) relationship. The two characters are blurred. The speaker’s repetition of a shifting, amorphous “other” and the undefined “you” and “I” make sure we understand they are in some way a single entity. But they are also placed in opposition to each other. One is unsatisfied by fantasies about “other women.” The other, our speaker, fills this void with fantasies “involving other men.” The restraint here is impressive. The speaker could have given us more about the particulars of this misshapen sex life (and we probably would have listened), but that’s not what the poem is after. Instead, it explores the speaker’s POV within the framework of the relationship. And it’s a dark portrait. When she describes “Me, bruised from knots. / Me, over a railing,” the speaker makes apparent her victimhood. The relationship’s fantasy violence is violence nonetheless.
This violence is bolstered by the noirish quality of the scene that follows. It’s a pretty straightforward scene. The two characters are walking to dinner, passing shadowy fountains and ineffective street lamps. That’s pretty much it. But for this speaker, a nighttime stroll is a nightmare. To her, it’s danger, decay, and sadness. To her, a man does not just “lay” in the park. He “lay dead or alive.” For her, a foghorn is a mournful cry from one of the port’s “poor ships.” She senses danger in the “challenge of wet surfaces.” In fact, she seems to sense danger in everything, making it easy to imagine a cause/effect relationship between her relationship and her bleak worldview.
As she sees the world through this dark filter, things get even weirder after the line “I had the fantasy I knew I could not say.” From this point on, the poem walks the seam of fantasy and reality. The poem is interspersed with dream-like references to water – the “water from my brain,” the swimming cars, the gliding, the lakes, the “wet surfaces” – but it also describes a real street scene. The cars, of course, are not swimming. They are driving – perhaps with a particular fluidity or amid deep, explosive puddles. Yet they contribute to the poem’s image of a city submerged. The water in the poem gives us a shadow of a flood – with all of a flood’s dangerous silence and hidden strength – in what’s ultimately just a wet street. It describes, yet again, potential violence but violence nonetheless. By choosing language that works to both paint a real scene and create an unreal image, we can feel the water welling into a flood as we feel the speaker emerge into the realization that she will be left alone in the city. Even the speaker isn’t sure how she’s come to this conclusion, but something in her movement down the poem, something in her certainty, lets us believe she knows exactly what the future holds.
– The Editors
