Rock Salt
it can’t be salt, just salt, as the reason
the ocean doesn’t freeze—a reticent fury
or maybe a thrum in the untouchable underbelly,
its capacity to hold its ships as though
they’re tiny replicas in a bottle.
we recall the ocean a certain way,
elusive blue when it’s really more dreamscape
grey and its fat froth silhouettes
the skin like it’s desperate for a touch,
wants to cup it in its sudden curve. and o
when i jump in the Atlantic, i want to be
rock salt, a hollow splash, dissolving into it
dripping nothing but pulse that keeps
vast liquid from freezing, faster
than foxes, fill me full of sharks.
it’s blood we say, it can’t freeze
because of all this blood inside it—
human, bottom-feeder, whale, cosmic
debris and all the matter and boundless
energy that cannot be created or destroyed.
| Charlotte Seley |
|
levelheaded: Rock Salt
How do we contend with our smallness? Can small things (like us) affect the wide world? Does it matter? Even if this poem can’t quite answer these questions, it’s built to give a metaphorical framework to the unknowable world that washes over us in every moment. It’s built to offer this speaker’s almost-hopeful inclination to embrace the “boundless / energy that cannot be created or destroyed.” We are tiny, fragile things in an enormous, furious world. But we are also part of the enormous, furious, very alive world.
“Rock salt” is hard – like a rock! – but it dissolves effortlessly in water. It’s easy to see ourselves in a speaker who says, “i want to be / rock salt, a hollow splash, dissolving into it / dripping nothing.” There is an element of self-annihilation in these lines, but the speaker also believes she’ll become a part of the “pulse that keeps / vast liquid from freezing,” that she’ll become part of the “reticent fury,” that she’ll dissolve into the “skin” of her metaphorical ocean.
And so, a holistic worldview develops through the poem. The speaker starts out saying, “It can’t be salt, just salt” that gives the ocean its singular properties. Her denial melts into a recollection of the ocean. With an ecstatic “o / when I jump in the Atlantic,” we tightrope over nostalgia. The “rock salt” metaphor grows from an actual memory of leaping into the ocean. In her fantasy, she becomes what is “full of sharks.” But she takes this conflation of the ocean and the self further, giving us a collective theory that the ocean is salty is because of all the blood. If the poem had a thesis, this might work: everything – “human, bottom-feeder, whale, cosmic / debris” – is a part of a giant, universal, inescapable soup. In the context of this ever-changing soup, the final lines explode into the law of conservation of energy.
This is a poem about creation and obliteration. It’s a poem about living and dying. But at its most basic, it is a nature poem about the ocean. Like the best nature poems, “Rock Salt” is a mirror that reflects back at us what we might believe of the world. There’s a bit of idealism, a bit of self-aggrandizement, but in the end, everything is everything. The parts of the world are the world itself.
-The Editors
