Self-Portrait in Her Inherited Wreck
After Adrienne Rich
I end each day with a new name for city. Today I’ve seen
inside a tunnel, its emetic rivers an epithet my blood
responds to with ease. With ease I should look to my citizens
to assess like the dripping crag my debts. I end each day
on the back of a housefly, our hunger the same.
One name for my city is quota; another name sick. I left a man
to rummage the cupboards, four crackers to my name:
I am proud of the bones my city lets surface, these
monuments from the sand. My guilt is plastic, it wraps
poison film of my stomach the way I think of him now.
One name yenta, another, paperless bill. Today my poet died but
I’m not done with the trash or the terror of fathoms. The honorable fear
means knowing nothing, the head arrhythmic and ground as the braking train
its anguish also its limit: I’m sorry. I refuse the part
in my commute where I end on an image. Threadbare. Augur.
What can be said for the tulips can be said of my timesheets
the love of day they exhaust is the same. Today I am
searching the rigmarole where my luck ran out. One name rich.
One name finished. Pocked and brideless strangers they whistle You didn’t.
Nobody sees me it’s true. When a herd of boys march down my street
a beautiful illusion will end with disgust. Dressless I’ll crawl
the tracks a cadre of dirt, my city cabled to a lady in ermine.
Yesterday’s end sits in my wallet, private, insufferably clean.
| Natalie Eilbert |
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levelheaded: Self-Portrait in Her Inherited Wreck
Natalie Eilbert’s “Self-Portrait in Her Inherited Wreck” is written After Adrienne Rich in several ways. Eilbert’s writing thematically and stylistically pays homage to Rich’s work. In another, more haunting sense, the poem is written After Adrienne Rich because the person Eilbert refers to no longer exists.
Like much of Rich’s work, this week’s poem is urgent. It’s deeply felt. Fittingly, its statement of purpose lies at its physical center, where Eilbert writes: “Today my poet died but / I’m not done with the trash or the terror of fathoms.”
In the above quotation, the word “fathoms” is particularly interesting. As a noun, it refers to units of measurement used in calculating the depth of water, harping back to Rich’s poem Diving Into the Wreck and/or the book by the same name. Perhaps coincidentally but by no means less interestingly, a fathom is six feet—the depth at which the dead are buried. Adding to the metaphorical possibilities, etymologically speaking, “fathom” comes from the Old English fæðm, meaning the “length of the outstretched arm.” As a verb, when one “fathoms” an idea, he or she comes to understand it. The quoted lines above suggest that those efforts at understanding something as incomprehensible as death can be “terror” inducing.
When read sentence by sentence, Eilbert’s poem is muscular, authoritative. Taken phrase by phrase, it speaks in whispers, asking to be re-examined for all its complexities. On first glance, the title itself seems straightforward—the speaker has inherited the wreck. When we look again, we realize it’s possible that Rich inherited the wreck first. Then we realize that actually the line of succession reaches far into that past, includes us in the present, and extends into the indefinite future. Despite this depressing thought, ultimately, by its very existence, this is a poem about “searching” and naming, about obliterating “illusion.” It is a poem about going on in the face of tragedy, and bearing the unbearable blank slate that comes when suffering ends.
– The Editors
