Why He Got Divorced Again
Because like the man he saw
in the emergency room
in Seward, Alaska, no bigger
than your average Burger King,
hard against a mountain
that keeps the fog in town,
who had got drunk and macheted
an arm off hacking alders
and was helicoptered away
from waking at three a.m.
the next morning to spend twelve hours
on someone else’s boat,
who was never able to lose
the smell of fish, he knew
the rains were here again
and something had to give.
| Mark Jackley |
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levelheaded: Why He Got Divorced Again
The emotional core of Jackley’s “Why He Got Divorced Again” rests conspicuously in the extended simile that compares the speaker’s feelings about his divorce to another man’s horrifying, self-inflicted, accidental amputation of his arm. To make things more of a bummer, this fresh amputee even misses a fishing trip with his buddies. For good reason, Jackley lays the tragedy on thick. The simplicity of the poem’s major simile is misleading. Even in a metaphorical sense, the speaker’s emotional pain can’t really compare to the physical and emotional pain of losing a limb. What’s most important is that the speaker thinks the two compare, enacting his own self-interest by including details about an imaginary fishing trip that seem inappropriate in light of such violence. This speaker is clearly devastated by this new divorce and is reaching out for a connection, however false, with anyone—even a stranger in a memory of an emergency room.
The poem deepens when we realize that this speaker, while absolutely sincere, is also misguided. He wants to make sense of his emotions, but the truth about the divorce cannot be packed into a single simile, no matter how detailed a tangent it may be. So, why did he get divorced again? Because “he knew the rains were here and something had to give”? Of the many reasons one might get divorced, rain (literal or metaphorical) does not immediately spring to mind, and despite its punch, the final line of the poem seems drained of emotional meaning. So, why did he get divorced again? The truth can more likely be found in the emptiness of the final lines—an enactment of the emptiness of the speaker. The poem ends up an experiment in mismatching intangible emotions with tangible pieces of language.
– The Editors
