Poem For the Relief of Fallen Women
This wishing well is bottomless.
A penny from heaven would drop
all the way to the Indian Ocean
(Not China, as you were always told)
to land in the hand of some fisherman
as he guts some great, gasping fish,
its eye a coin emptied of value.
They’re always grasping something,
men. Always holding anything but
the bag. You, you’re holding a knife
at an oblique angle to the world,
away from your body, every body.
The cutting board is a map of erasures.
There are all these onions, waiting.
The setting sun above the sink turns
their tight shawls of white skin pink.
But they are merely onions, not fish.
You spit out the hooks. There is no wish.
| Gregory Crosby |
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levelheaded: Poem For the Relief of Fallen Women
Look at the move this poem makes with the sentence “They’re always grasping at something, / men.” First, the line’s enjambment gives us a moment of pause. Our understanding of who’s doing the “grasping” is delayed by the position of “men” on a different line. Then, the word “grasping” calls forth the “great, gasping fish” from two lines before. This isn’t just a rhyme—it’s the same word with one additional letter. (We get a similar effect later with “sink” and “skin pink”). The movement of “men” to another line softens an obvious connection between the “gasping fish” and the “grasping” men, allowing us to consider other possibilities as we pause to understand who is doing the “grasping.” In effect, “grasping,” “gasping,” and “men” stretch their association across the middle lines of the poem, suggesting a connection rather than comparing men and fish outright.
If we’ve focused on this one moment, it’s because these lines helps us understand how the poem works as a whole. The poem is held together by connections that leapfrog amid its lines. The most prominent of these begins with the “wishing well” from the first line which shows up in the “coin emptied of value” and in the final sentence of the poem, “There is no wish.” A bit later, a pop geography lesson (apparently a hole through the earth would end up in the Indian Ocean, who knew?) connects to a cutting board described as a “map of erasures.” A fish swims its way from “the hand of some fisherman” through the “white skin pink” of the onions to the “hooks” of the final line.
To be sure, there are elements of narrative in the poem. In early lines, we follow a coin as it falls from heaven through a magical well into a fisherman’s hand. Then the unidentified “you” is poised above a group of onions, ready to chop. But even the clearest moments of narrative are blanketed by connections to previous lines. What drives the poem is its enactment of the connective tissue between thought and language. We can’t be sure what these intertwining relationships suggest about the poem’s deceivingly precise title—perhaps we should look to the various meanings of “relief” and “fallen” for a clue—but their increasing complexity is at the center of the poem’s effect on a reader.
-The Editors
