Orphan anvils
The lightning hit so close I could not see
for sure the devastation. I waited, needing
the storm to go away. I feared debris
had trashed the yard again. Instead, receding
thunder marked the end. No guarantee
of safety. This is how we part, misreading
love for refuge. Really all we had
was pleasure, little moments here and there.
Tomorrow you will go and I’ll be glad,
or sad, perhaps. We won’t look back or swear
to write. For now, the sky’s blue is clad
in dissipating anvils, disappear-
ing storms. Outside you pick up broken sticks.
Inside I mourn the troth I could not fix.
| Christine Klocek-Lim |
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levelheaded: Orphan anvils
Some poetry attacks like a grizzly bear—with unpredictable movements and swift, powerful blows. Christine Klocek-Lim’s “Orphan anvils” is more akin to a boa constrictor that methodically positions itself around its prey without ever appearing methodical, then gradually creeps closer until the animal in its grasp goes breathless.
After a first read, two of our four editors didn’t realize this poem was a sonnet. Klocek-Lim’s use of enjambment draws our attention away from the edges where rhymes occur and into the typographical center of the poem where sentences end and begin. This snake-like movement fits nicely into our metaphor, but more importantly, it keeps us inside the poem’s heart-wrenching content as its pleasing peripheral sounds wash over us.
“Orphan anvils” is a melding of opposites in a whole bunch of other ways. The title tenderizes a hard surface, humanizes a machine. The first line teaches us that seeing something can make it so we “could not see.” The long vowel sound at the ends of lines 1, 3, and 5 swings open windows that the final consonant sound in lines 2, 4, and 6 quickly slams shut. This overarching technique of balanced destruction, of each thing meeting its opposite, makes perfect sense given the poem seems to mark the end of a romantic relationship.
In a world where there is “No guarantee / of safety,” the speaker’s reporterly tone is a devastating acceptance of hard truths: “This is how we part, misreading / love for refuge […] Tomorrow you will go and I’ll be glad, / or sad, perhaps.” It is as if these lines, in their banality, evidence that the poet herself has given up—a painful past having marred her desire to be original.
True to its serpent form though, the poem turns again and subtly tightens its grip, this time with the words “For now.” “[D]issipating anvils” take the place of clouds, and the present (“ing”) “storms.” While her lost love is “outside” staying busy with the concrete task of picking up tangible objects, the speaker “inside” morns a broken vow—a “troth”; that is, an abstract, deeply personal concept that also happens to mark the poem’s most elevated language.
– The Editors
