Traverse City Record-Eagle

Fleda Brown: On Poetry

THE FISH CHANNEL

As you were dying, sometimes I went back

To the room to catch a nap or a shower.

I'd click on the television for an hour,

Flip around the channels for lack

Of anything to do but sit by your bed

And watch you breathe and breathe, that motion

Your only language. Some kinds of devotion

May take more imagination than mine, bred

Of simply wanting you to stay. Sitting

In front of the screen, watching the chain

Of bubbles rise, tracking the plain

Paths, became a kind of sedative, an unremitting

Way to ease the coming loss. I knew nearly

Nothing of death, of the way it rings in the numb

Mind, chiming without end, or how some

Of the brain's cells will seize on it, sincerely

And with the strength of the tides.

Channel 7 was its own ocean, a narcotic blue

Square of water, the fish almost washed from view

By the lights behind them, and, near the sides,

The plants pulled and swayed against the water.

Often I imagined the whole hotel, all those sad,

Grieving people, sitting at the edges of their beds,

Staring at the Fish Channel at once. The water.

The bubbles. Fish pulsing across the screen.

-- Margot Schilpp, from "The World's Last Night," Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001.

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February 13, 2011

On Poetry: Poetry in bleak midwinter

By Fleda Brown, Local columnist ----

This time of year, I often think of Christina Rosetti's poem, "In the Bleak Midwinter." When it's attached to its gorgeous melody, you may know it as a hymn. Fairly or unfairly, we often use the seasons as metaphors for the state of our spirit. We're in the bleak time of year, holidays over, spring a long way off. Sometimes everything feels that way, suspended in sadness, waiting. The thought of waiting made me remember this poem by a friend, Margot Schlipp, who, like me, has published several books from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Margot is former editor of Quarterly West, a major literary journal."The Fish Channel" is from her first book.

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