You, Too, Could Write a Poem by David Orr

Author:David Orr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-01-24T11:29:08+00:00

The mindless heave of which they rode

A fluid shelf

Breaks as they leave, falls and, slowed,

Loses itself.

Clear, the sheathed bodies slick as seals

Loosen and tingle;

And by the board the bare foot feels

The suck of shingle.

There are many ways to write about surfing—one could focus on the danger, the grace, the speed, and so forth. But it’s typical of Gunn that while he gives us a sense of all these elements, he’s drawn to instances of contact: the point at which “the bare foot feels / The suck of shingle”; the moment in which “marbling bodies have become / Half wave, half men, / Grafted it seems by feet of foam.” Feel and touch and pressure are constants throughout this selection, whether it’s the longing of a hawk for “the feel . . . / Of catcher and of caught / Upon your wrist,” the swimmer who remembers “the pull and risk / Of the Pacific’s touch . . . / Its cold live sinews pulling at each limb,” or simply the “secure firm dry embrace” of longtime domestic affection.

Even in the AIDS-related elegies that dominate his most famous book, The Man with Night Sweats, Gunn is drawn to comparisons involving substance brought to bear on substance. “Still Life,” a poem about a terminal patient, concludes with the image of “the tube his mouth enclosed / In an astonished O.” “The Missing” imagines the vast web of friendships, now vanishing, as a “Supple entwinement through the living mass / Which for all that I knew might have no end, / Image of an unlimited embrace.” But the poem that gives The Man with Night Sweats its title is perhaps Gunn’s most arresting use of this sort of metaphor. It begins with a man waking at night (“I wake up cold, I who / Prospered through dreams of heat”) and recognizing the rising weakness in his once-powerful body. It concludes:

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