levelheaded: Self-Portrait as Bird or Bee

For all the ways this week’s poem is a “Self-Portrait as Bird or Bee,” it’s also a self-portrait as snow or ice, stone and moss. So much of the piece’s emotional heft comes in the form of what is not directly stated, but instead is arrived at by the reader through his or her interpretation of the work. That’s not to say there aren’t road signs to guide us to a specific reading. There are plenty. Let’s look at some.

In the poem’s first line (“I’ve built and burnt more”), Shipman’s simple language welcomes us into the piece. Just as quickly, her smart line break expands the line’s meaning. On one level, Shipman presents a speaker who has burnt more nests than she’s built, which in itself is a far reaching metaphor. By bumping the object of the sentence down to line two, she also invites us into the world of a narrator who, generally speaking, has destroyed more than she’s constructed. This first line also lends itself to the idea that the speaker herself has been “burnt” before, a familiar phrase when discussing human relationships.

Speaking of relationships, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out the wink to the birds and the bees in the poem’s title. As we’ve already suggested, a love interest seems to be at the center of the poem. Failures in this realm have been so impactful that they’ve left the speaker thinking “there’s no reason to believe / [she] won’t do it again,” meaning that she’s likely to ruin another relationship. She’ll build and burn and be burnt some more. Through the clever enjambment in these lines, Shipman also presents a speaker who finds “no reason to believe” in much of anything. Taking this a step further, looking at the second couplet independent of the first, the line “I won’t do it again” reads as an assertion by the speaker that she is done believing altogether.

You might be wondering how a person could go through life without belief and not be totally miserable. Well, Shipman posits two different answers, one of which reveals itself ever so subtly in the next line. She writes: “I wonder, if I start over, is there room / for you?” One solution to a life without belief is human connection, yet the speaker is unsure if that’s even possible. The other solution slyly slipped into this line lies in the phrase “I wonder[.]” Here, Shipman disguises an entire philosophy in a two-word colloquialism: lack of belief can be combated by maintaining a sense of wonder about the world.

How does one find wonder in the world? By seeing beauty and finding meaning in nature: snow and ice, birds and bees, stone and moss. Sadly, like lost loves, snow and ice go. Like the adored partner unable to reciprocate his adorer’s feelings, the stone is embarrassed by the moss that clings to it.

The poem’s surprising final line, “exploding, suddenly, with bees,” reads like a little explosion of its own. However, the form of the poem (couplets for couples!) marries its content not only through the sense of wonder and surprise inherent throughout, but also through the author’s consistent demonstration of restraint and control. The rhythm created by the final sentence’s three commas echo a sense of cautiousness. Sure, the last line is an explosion, but it’s a tame one arrived at by a speaker who has “built and burnt” and been burnt before. Yes, she is awestruck by the spontaneous beauty of a swarm of bees. She’s also fearful of the prospect of being stung.

– The Editors