Visitation
The first time it happened was Day 2 of the hurricane.
I listened to the wind. It was filled with screams.
I crawled into bed calculating the distance
Between our house and the tree across the street.
I pulled the blanket to my neck, fingers curled over the edge,
But they weren’t my own.
My husband was asleep and I was alone
With one of them.
My head was in its mouth.
Hot and cold and black.
I kept my eyes open.
Its body swayed.
It became a kind of sleep,
The inside of the spirit.
It was a boat.
We rode the whole dark north.
The moon lit up the water
And I could see the curve
Of the glacier hooked to the sky.
Then the moon was gone and I held still.
In the morning I looked outside
And New York was underwater.
| Hila Ratzabi |
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levelheaded: Visitation
Pared down to its narrative, this poem is about a person who is “visited” by something – an “it” – in the night. In true horror movie fashion, “it” puts the speaker’s head in its mouth, which is “Hot and cold and black.” Also in true horror movie fashion, we aren’t sure what “it” is, or whether it’s a figment of the speaker’s dream. When the speaker conflates herself with the “visitor” by describing “fingers curled over the edge, / But they weren’t my own,” she emphasizes the uncanny otherness of her perspective. Through its first half, the poem does an excellent job giving us the creeps.
This is especially effective because these nightmarish moments are juxtaposed with real fear. We can trust the poem’s events are really happening on “Day 2 of the hurricane” because the phrase “Day 2” doesn’t feel dreamy enough. Likewise with speaker’s account of “calculating the distance / between our house and the tree across the street.” This is specific and terrifying, and chillingly, it seems like an escape we might actually consider in a dangerous storm. As readers, we witness the reality of the storm transform into the unreality of the nightmare. The wind is “filled with screams.” The “body sways” like a tree might sway in a strong wind. The storm becomes the “it.”
In its second half, the poem shifts from its ghost story mode into a broader fantasy with the telling lines, “It became a kind of sleep, / The inside of the spirit.” Here, the speaker almost announces that she is dreaming, that her subconscious has taken over the narrative. The boat and the moonlit water predict the poem’s final line, so that the second half of the poem reverses the direction of the first half. The reality of an underwater New York seems to have morphed out of the speaker’s dream. Again, her dream and reality are fused. It’s not until “the moon was gone” that the speaker is shaken awake by morning and looks outside.
The oddest moment in the poem comes right at the beginning when the speaker refers to “the first time it happened.” We might infer from this that there was a second time it happened. But by referring to a “first time” without referring to a second time, the poem isolates that figure of speech. What is normally a very simple, comprehensible phrase becomes an abstraction. Why would it matter if something is “first” if nothing comes next? It’s a subtle distortion of logic that undermines our expectations of narrative, and it contributes to the poem’s dream-like movement. It seems the entire poem – in its narrative and in subtle moves like this “first time” business – hopes to unite the “real world” with the subconscious. The poem argues that the two are inseparable, and that both can be startlingly real.
-The Editors
