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Rescue

 

In this story the boy never was.

Says, and yesterday and yesterday.

 

It was a time when the whole world

could fit into a hollow belly.

 

There were strong winds and at least

one fearful sea.

 

The roundness of everything was

too perfect to be a boat.

 

Nevertheless, a boat.

And later?  I haven’t seen anyone

 

to speak or disagree.

The water is full of impossible things.




Jessica Bixel

levelheaded: Rescue

 

This poem begins by self-identifying as a “story,” so it’s easy to expect certain elements of narrative to filter through, and when we squint a little, they do. There are some characters (the speaker, the boy). There is a conflict (“strong winds and at least / one fearful sea”). There is a kind of resolution (“And later?”). Mostly though we are asked to piece together the supposed “story” from fragments of the poems ostensible “rescue.”

 

The second line cuts away from the narrative suggested by the first. The poem implies someone is saying “and yesterday and yesterday,” but we can’t be sure who is speaking. Is it the speaker? Is it the boy who “never was”? In either case, the repeated “yesterday” introduces the past into the poem, a concept that’s cemented by the poem’s fairy-taleish second couplet. The grandiosity of “It was a time when the whole world / could fit into a hollow belly” casts the story into a sort of creation myth. It’s as if we’ve begun listening to an archetypal Great Mother story.

 

In a way, every birth is an addition to Great Mother archetype. Certainly if there is a story to be gleaned from this poem, motherhood is the glue that holds the fragments together. If the poem presents itself as having implications for “the whole world,” it also presents a set of very specific implications for the boy that “never was.” The phrase, “hollow belly” represents either an empty space in a belly (perhaps waiting to be filled) or a hollowed belly that already contains something (or someone). Even more ambiguous is the world “fearful” in the speaker’s description of the sea. “Fearful” has two almost opposite meanings—full of fear and frightening—either (or both) of which apply here. The sea, along with “strong winds,” certainly elicits fear in the speaker, but by suggesting the sea is also full of fear, the poem gives at least some power to the rescuer.

 

When the speaker refers to “the roundness of everything” we might picture a woman’s “belly,” round and hollow except for a developing child’s “whole world.” And the entrance of “a boat” ferrying its passenger through the “strong winds” and “fearful sea” solidifies the possibility that this “story” is about every mother’s “rescue” of their child by birthing them out of oblivion into the world. Whether the boy who “never was” is a boy that never will be or a boy who currently is, in the end he appears to be one of those “impossible things” in the water.

 

 

– The Editors