Reflections on RiverFlesh


The language of this poem is gruesome. So much blood and bodily fluid with imagery of sacrifice, inside-out organs, charred heart blood on snow, afterbirth, cauls, hematomas, broken bones and of course flesh.  There is a sense of so much darkness and desolation in lines like "My ripped seam the unsewn hole of Nothing" and "My face inhuman and my eyes a desert."
What is being birthed in this poem? And what is the “ monster,” the “thing” that sheds its skin in the water of the river? 

In these verses birth is equated with a violent cycle, a “calamitous dream of creation” invoking “bestial fear.” 

What is the poison of revenge? And whose revenge? 

What is the muscle between the forefinger and thumb that is the “true other”? Is there anything between those fingers but the self or rather the opposable thumbs that allow for digits to grasp, tools to be wielded, one of the very defining features of evolution which allowed Homo Sapiens to change their relationship to nature by dominating, manipulating and eventually causing massive destruction to the soil they tilled and the earth we inhabit.   
 
What makes us human or “inhuman”? The Biblical reference of the “surge breaking out of his open rib” seems to call on the divide between human, the revenge “poisoned” eden around them and the monster associated with death/birth.  Yet the narrator turns to question if the monster is in fact an “enemy”/”tormentor” or if they are perhaps twins “mired in the same blood.”  Is the monster of destruction that hunts the narrator under the ice actually one and the same as humanity?  Is it human domination and desecration of the earth, the “wreck of snow” (climate change?) that is “melting us to nothing”?  This creature of destruction is in fact the narrator’s self proclaimed echo and future and the narrator is forever scarred never to heal by the ancestral trauma of the legacy of domination, oppression and degradation. 
Is the monster human nature? Or is it possibly capitalism? 
“What more can this be but lords and torches
The workers swallowing misery and lead
All the words born out of zeros.” 
This verse makes me think that the narrator is speaking of the devastation of power and the inhuman nature of systems of extractive production which create a working poor to toil and suffer the consequences mentally and physically from the oppression and literal poisoning of the earth around them. 
It seems the narrator also suggests that despite all the poisoning and trauma we carry or “whatever our deformity” we continue to partner, love, and have children.  But “because we parented the creature,/here ruin is the sign.”  What is the future world we leave as legacy? Can anyone fully heal from these ancestral grief trauma?

River flesh Reflection

Riverflesh was a very full and hectic poem when reading for me, but in a very beautifully honest way. The poem reminded me of the pain of loving that can exist within the pain of growth. Riverflesh felt very reminisant of a period of rebirth and healing for the person telling the story this poem paints.  The lines “The ice storm black as extinguished hope / This experience has made me unnatural / Where he goes he knows that I will follow” remind me of the difficulty that can felt in periods of growth, as well as the importance of healing behind these moments. The poem also [ushed me to reflect further on how healing is a beautiful process but can also be difficult, ugly, and painful but still always centred in love and hope for betterment.

Riverflesh Response

The references Marriott makes to the female person and violence reminds me of the systematic ways that violence towards female bodies is put into practice during war and conquests. The connection between childbirth and the female person in Marriott's poem makes the reader pay attention to the affect childbirth has on the female body. The lines, "her spine wracked/ Her knees bleeding on the path of snow/ Beneath a calamitous dream of creation", evoke the physical exertions we associate with birth. The females spine being "wracked" by the immense pain of the babies body pushing against her back, the imagery of blood and a creation/baby that comes from the complete destruction of the vagina. The forced regulation of birth and rape along with this "calamitous" process is made even more devastating. Birth is sacred. Women's bodies are sacred. The violent invasion of this by an oppressor is the "deformity" or "crippled alien" that Marriott speaks of in his piece. Because this violence is still present through the child. The generational trauma and impact that this atrocity "birthed" is "re-birthed" or "reincarnated" in that child and their children and beyond. This process is similar to the way once natural ecologies are invaded and violence is prepetuated to the land and the ecosystems around it that space will never be the same ever again. You will always find traces of the distress left behind.

Riverflesh Response: Birth is violent, Life is cruel

Initially, the most interesting aspect of this poem is the series of grotesque images that Marriott evokes throughout the poem. In a sense, he demystifies the process of giving birth and subverts the traditional narrative of it being beautiful and natural to foreign and alien. He uses very distinct language such as "unmade," "nightmare," and "beastial," and what I think it does is display how isolated the speaker feels in experiencing his birth.

I read this poem and subsequently asked myself "what does it mean to be born?" In the most literal sense none of us ask to be here, and come into a whole series of realities that proceed us. We are expected to then add on to the narrative of life (personal, familial, and societal) and that is essentially violent. To be asked to live without knowing what life even is. 

On top of the grotesque imagery and existential language that the poem evokes, when reading poetry I always think of its title and what its trying to communicate. Combining both "river" and "flesh" implies that life is both fixed and flowing. Flesh being an encasement of a singular existence, an encasement of lineage that subjects you to the prejudices of the world depending upon the identity the world selects for you, and an encasement of time and histories that you had no involvement in creating. River implies that our existence is a small droplet within the lake of humanity, but still essential to the the movement of humanity (like a river) as a whole. "The creature is my echo and my future," is the best line of the poem. The creature being Death, constantly reverberating to us what is to come (the future) as we go throughout life. Birth is violent, life is cruel, but it still goes on in cyclical fashion. Blood that is recycled, filtrated. 

Musings on River Flesh...

Reading 
and rereading
and reading yet again...

turning and examining the multiple contexts...I am struck by how each reading is colored by the light reflected off the screen...the brightness of the afternoon...the mystery of the darkness...the clarity of the morning light

There is an undeniable intimacy to these poems...I am curious as to the nature of "the thing that loses its skin in the water" is it amphibian? is it metamorphic? can it survive in two worlds? both the water and the land...

I feel a resonance with "lovers seeking sanctuary"...I have sought places to be free to express my hearts desire...they are sacred spaces...to lie beneath the blue sky to smell the breath of the green plants crushed in moment of passion....of life in its most primal expression...

but I am puzzled by
"The poison of revenge gone native in the grass"-I feel that the key lies within this rare, oddly specific line...I have my own understanding of "gone native"- I am of mixed ancestry and my attempts to reconnect to my various cultural practices have been met with this derisive phrase...but what could David Marriot intensions have been...I decide to Google it and discover

Gone native - 

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/gone+native

1. being the place or environment in which a person was born or a thing came into being: one's native land. 2. belonging to a person by birth or to a thing by nature; inherent: native ability. 3. belonging to or originating in a certain place; indigenous: native  dress. 4. born in a particular place: a native Chicagoan.

Suddenly a pattern emerges in this work! I had seen what appears to me to be evidence of illicit relationships...was it incest...was it nonconsensual master slave...was it nurture vs nature...I certainly cannot say

but what I saw was the merging of longing to belong with the shame of vulnerability... the birth of a new entity from this union...I thought of colonization...of the devastating effects of manifest destiny... the slave ships... the children born of this collision...

Now all of us here on this land that we continue to rape and exploit...
many of us tangled bloodlines of colonizer and colonized...where is our home?

Where may we be free to love? where may our passions ignite? What place are we giving to our children? When will we belong? Can we accept our history? Can we embrace the future that we deserve?

and the raping of the Earth continues...the seduction of greed...the base nature of man...
and yet nature embraces us...she will sustain us if we will but strip our selves of the evil of which we were created

Riverflesh

I found the very first line, "The thing sheds its skin in water"very unsettling. It reminds me of how a horror movie starts like, "Swamp Thing" or "The Thing." It elicited for me a feeling of the unknown, which is one of the top fears people have. I don't know in the poem what is shedding its skin but I do know in real life what sheds its skin, and that is snakes, lizards, frogs, spiders and various insects, all of which the idea of their skin coming off makes me uncomfortable and makes my skin crawl. This seems to be the very thing the poet wants to accomplish with that first line; to put the reader in a frame of mind of shedding, changing, creating, birthing, etcetera. The poet chooses a very visceral and tactile way of doing this as the poem continues with images of a river, a swamp, afterbirth, blood, darkness, womb, hematomas and with words and phrases like "fetus-gifts," "unsewn hole of Nothing," (I am wondering about the capitalization of "Nothing" here), "fever-drenched," "streams of blood," "beasts dripping with spray," "pulsing chasm," "mewling mouth,"etcetera.

The first part of the poem has a feel for me of a primal sexuality that is both animalistic and primitive. It echoes of our evolution from the primordial swamp and our return to it in the course of life during our acts of sex, reproduction, violence and death. It feels bleak to me in some areas as if the poet is telling us that either we are driven to return to our murky, swampy beginnings or that perhaps on some level a part of us never evolved beyond that but lives deep within the landscape of our subconscious.

I think the poets use of alliteration helps create this amorphous feeling of unease for me. In the first twenty lines alone there are 37 "s" sounds so that when read aloud, the poem nearly hisses though the teeth, imitating the sound of the creature we might imagine shedding its skin. I find it difficult to give form to this creature too, because there is no direct description or naming of the "monster devoured by his brother," only these unsettling references to the effects of the monster on the narrator, and what the narrator observes in his world.

In part III of the poem the narrator returns "to the place of birth" and I begin to think it might be the heroes journey home but certain words and phrases such as, "to the enemy whose grin unfolds like dark butterfly wings," "mired in the same bad blood," "beasts dripping with spray," and the line, "The gorge is a pulsing chasm. I can smell his skin and his inside-out organs," make me think that the narrator has returned to a place where they are having to deal with someone who has abused them in some way.

Riverflesh Response

I had to read Riverflesh a few times, then slowly line by line a couple times. In part one it reads like the speaker is the fetus/baby/child in this poem. The lines that stood out to me were “In the mewling mouth my innocent mess of grammar The materials a nightmare, not my fault.” The materials a nightmare almost sound like the beliefs, customs and thought of his parents are not his fault but he has been stuck with their genes and who they are as parents. Throughout the poem there are strong tones of violence, the pastoral, mystery, skin and the body. There is so much going on in Part I. But it seems a lot like the baby is describing their parents, the mother “A girl admires her half-exposed breasts Her spine wracked Her knees bleeding on the path of snow.” Then to be born “The wronged child not in words but in the desire.” From the child’s view it seems they were born out of desire rather than what society would deem a conventional birth from married parents. The baby even describes themself as “My face inhuman and my eyes a desert.”

Another line that stood out to be was “Lovers come and go But the true other is a muscle between forefinger and thumb.” I had to google the muscle between the forefinger and thumb, the results I got were the median nerve. It is also stated if the median nerve is damaged is may lead to servere carpal tunnel syndrome. It made me think, lovers come and go for the mother but her true other maybe the pain, the pain of having carpel tunnel syndrome?

In the second stanza, I was a bit confused when the speaker is talking about the brother. The two lines that stood out were, "Go mourn the brother’s broken mirror” and “For the monster devoured by his brother.” I wondered what is the brother’s broken mirror? And who is the monster? I don’t know at this moment but it has left me wondering and captivated.

 In part II, the line “Whatever our deformity, here it is a lost child.” I am wondering if the speaker is the lost child in the poem? Also I wonder what they are referring to as the creature in part II?

Part II seems more cohesive to me like in the line “flitting across the alder’s yellow eyebrow, or perhaps we are twins--tormentor, whose bright eyes are the shade of mine, mired in the same bad blood” it sounds like the speaker may be talking about their father. The speaker mentions the mother and violence she endured and has hints of the parents. But the speaker hints at a monster, creature, a “tormentor whose bright eyes are the same shade as mine.” The speaker then writes very powerful lines which read, “I can smell his skin and his inside-out organs. And the charred heart devoured from its pitch black cavern as he hunts me through the ice; the wreck of snow melting us to nothing as day breaks onto storm.” Wow! Those lines were like a punch to the face for whoever it was written for. The lines drip with a painful past and a “scarred surface never heals.” The last stanza says “At sunrise, I will loosen some more of his flesh,” as to say each day I am breaking away from being the person I am one half of (parent). The words “At sunrise” are very hopeful as to say despite the violence, pain, broken past and nightmare the speaker has endured the sun will still rise giving us new beginning i.e. new skin.

Thoughts on Riverflesh

Riverflesh. An amalgamation of human body and water body. Much like being in the womb — you are flesh encased by liquid. When I first read this poem my brain wanted to read the title as Riverfish, a creature that somehow makes sense, that feels non-threatening. I am trying to track and reflect on the moments when I misread and how that can drastically alter how I come to a piece of work. But this is why we reread!

The question that continued to arise for me throughout my reading of this poem was “what would it be like to remember your birth?” In this work we see how traumatic this experience is. Marriott writes “Her knees bleeding on the path of snow / Beneath a calamitous dream of creation.” Bloody, out in the cold, and creation, birth, becomes a catastrophic imagining. I ask myself where is the hope, the “calamitous dream” was still once a dream, something desired.

There is so very much happening in that first section, things are becoming undone. The words unworldly, unmade, unmanned, unsewn are all used inside those two stanzas and near the end the phrase “This experience has made me unnatural” appears. Who is becoming unnatural through this experience? What makes “me” unnatural — is it the violence, the pain, the loss? There is a strangeness in the way the body contorts itself in this poem, the body is unmade, unworldly, it becomes unnatural through this experience.

At the end a year has passed, the sun has risen and we are left with scars that never heal.

D. Marriott Response

This piece had me in and out of allusions like no other. For sometime I was completely unable to make up my mind- was this piece about birth? death? is it a myth? someone's reality? or all of the them?

After the relentless back and fourth, I finally fully threw my heart into the theory that felt familiar in the most uncomfortable ways- the relationship, reflections, with self.  

The way the author begins (The thing sheds its skin in water) the piece reminds me of a moment with myself- a moment in the mirror, shedding the outsides of my gender, my naked self laughing at my reflection, not realizing the irony of it all (A girl admires her half-exposed breasts/Her spine wracked/Her knees bleeding on the path of snow). The third limb of myself yerning to tug both broken parts in their direction and embrace them (Let him embrace my unmade being). I understood that these parts of myself were right for feeling wrong (The wronged child not in words but in the desire), but I knew they were not aware of the war they had declared on their shared vessel (A girl throws herself in the river).

After the opening lines, the rest of the poem feels like a battle. There is blood, pain and death. The confrontation is with the narrator's own reflection.

Whatever our deformity,
here it is a lost child.

Because we parented the creature

despite the pain and discomfort the narrator feels with who they are, towards the end of  part I, the character begins to realize the destruction such a perspective will have on he himself. How will these parts of himself reconsile? Can they?
(Lovers come and go/But the true other is a muscle between forefinger and thumb)

Pain is sometimes easier-

In part II, the narrator seems to have lost hope of what could be and has settled into what is-

(here ruin is the sign /On a filthy mass of rags/breasts lie strapped to words/

I flail in the womb)

During the final stanza of the poem, we are confronted once again, with the author's ability to strike the fear of god within us with his clear imagery (to the enemy whose grin unfolds like dark butterfly wings in the wilderness).  These first lines give us a hint of the circular arch the narrator has been sketching around us, and before we know any better he has closed the gap right around us and left us in his darkness. Empathy does not do this pain justice- during the last stanza we are left with the thoughts the narrator is gappling with, we can smell [their] skin and his inside-out organs. But like the narrator we can not be put off, for the creature is my echo, and my future.

By the end we are desserted, alone, with ourselves and with only ourselves to blame. War declared on one's self is a battle not lost, not won, simply one that leaves a scarred surface [that] never heals.

Riverflesh Response

Riverflesh threw me for all kinds of loops. Twists, turns, and imagery in every line. Where I thought I knew what was going on, another descriptive scene would cause me to think again. Many lines stuck with me as it evoked emotion or left a unique scene drawn inside my head. 

“And her yellow eye will baffle the corridor” 

“The ice storm black as extinguished hope” 

Yellow and black colors were revisited throughout the poem. As were themes of birth, hopelessness, creation, and destruction. It was rich with feelings and alliteration as well. I enjoyed the personification of the river or whatever Marriott is describing as “the thing” which he ends by declaring, “The creature is my echo and my future.” 

Moreover, my favorite line is written by stanza III. where Marriott writes, “...to the enemy whose grin unfolds like dark butterfly wings.” Here I can feel the slow movement of the grin forming across this unknown face. Teeth shining as the lips begin to part. The butterfly wing imagery is what gives it this almost ominous feeling. This feeling that as a whole, the poem seems to move in and out of.  

RiverFlesh thoughts

I felt isolated reading this poem. I felt as if I were alone in a room (I was), without people- or anything- around for miles. The violence of creation, and the violence of birth are running wild. This poem is one of blood, as well as filled with it. It is hard to know where to identify in this poem. It places you everywhere. You are both inside

What caught me first was “Frightening in their joy, their bulimia”. The comparison between joy and bulimia- it’s raw. I feel lost in trying to explain the weight of this work. It feels heavy, it applies pressure so much like a baby does within the womb. As it progresses through the sections, we are moved through birth. It pulses, like a heartbeat, and tears.

The thirds section feels like an afterbirth. There is sunrise, a phantom new beginning. But the monster is still there, the "The creature is my echo and my future". So there really is no escape from the original violence that is described in the first section.

Rhetorically, the most prominent device, for me, is the alliteration. It propels the poem forward, with examples in "extracted enamel", and "bronze birds". More so, it speaks to Marriot's twins. There is no real beginning and end to each, maybe they are one in the same. There is a presence of a double, but the poem leads around it- it is a twin or monster?

The poem itself is the pulsing chasm.

Birth, Blood, Magic. Many thoughts on RIVERFLESH

Gina Piersanti

Elmaz Abinader

Poets of Color and their Ecologies

January 26, 2019

This poem threw me for a bit of a loop. The first paragraph left me searching for a clear point of view, or an obvious and specific subject, and I was unable to find one. Right off the bat, “The thing” sheds its skin. We’re left to fill in the blanks. Lovers, a girl, a child. All nameless and hard for me to envision. Each line painted a new vignette, different images flickering through my mind. There is little punctuation. Ideas are fragmented. I wonder what ideas this poem was born from. There are a slew of words about nature and bodies; water, river, snow, skin, breasts, spine, knees. My brain started putting words into categories to try to make sense of the words I was reading. There are many mentions of birth; “I flail in the womb”,“The afterbirth waiting to be milked”, fetus gifts, wronged child, lost child. I find that birth is often sanitized and sterilized in our popular culture. It is associated with the medical realm, not the natural. In movies and television we see it happening in clean, orderly hospitals full of doctors, machines, and fluorescent light. The blood is often emitted. The natural world far removed from something so common and natural. This poem connects birth back to nature, to the river, to the snow. It also connects it to the bloody, the painful, the nightmarish. Words like poison, revenge, bleeding, greif, and scar litter the page.

Part II has a different rhythm to it, a different voice. It repeats a pattern of two lines and a new paragraph, two lines, and a break. It is shorter, more space around the words. Sandwiched between much denser, wordier sections. This change in writing style suggests a change in speaker, perhaps the mother instead of the child. The second part feels more calm and orderly, more even and organized. The ideas still seem abstract to me, fetus-gifts and alien beings creating strange pictures in my brain, but the lines are less densely packed.

My brain has been trained to try to pick out narratives, and it’s fighting to make sense of it all, although I imagine that isn’t the point to this piece. It almost reminds me of the Supremes song “Love Child”, where Diana Ross sings about children born out of wedlock. Phrases like “Lovers come and go” and “Because we parented the creature” led me to this connection. The child is “lost”. The context of the birth, of the conception, seem chaotic and difficult to pin down.

At first read the parts of this poem that stood out most to me were the jarring and violent words, the ones that painted twisted, bloody pictures in my mind. A few reads in, however, I saw the same sentences that first made me wince as almost magical. For example, the line “After she conceives the Earth will burst”. This felt apocalyptic to me at first, threatening. It felt like the woman was being punished. Now, thought, there seems to be some kind of cosmic connection between woman and world. The Earth is in tune with her body, she has the power to shake the whole planet. Maybe burst is not a bad thing. Even the mentions of blood, of beastial fear, start to seem less evil and more natural. More honest, instinctual, normal, part of life. There is no birth without blood.

In some ways I find the synthesis of nature and birth beautiful, and in some ways a little disturbing. Perhaps this is partially because I know birth is natural and bloody. But I think I’m also weary of the gendering of birth, the association of both women and the Earth as “abundant” and “bountiful”, which seems to go hand in hand with objectification and exploitation. Birth is so often associated with womanhood, which of course, is problematic and exclusionary in more than one way. I don’t think this poem is making any claims about tenants of womanhood or the riches to be extracted from the Earth, it just reminds me of the other typical and worrisome ways women and land are written about.

Lastly, I’m curious about the spiritual, magical, or even mythic qualities of this poem. I picked up on mentions of  enemies, “medusas”, monsters, and “the goddess”. It gives this poem, which feels so deeply rooted in the earth, a sense of otherworldliness, drama, an old epic, passed down by word of mouth.

Twins, Myths, and Terror in David Marriott's Riverflesh

“The thing sheds its skin in water.”

The visceral nature and vagueness of this line sets the tone for rest of “Riverflesh,” as Marriott creates a world in which it’s hard to know what is what - a world that is both nightmare and myth, violence and creation, reality and terror. A world of gorges, pulsing chasms, naked goddesses, medusas, and monsters that reveal themselves to be your twin.

The second image of Part I is almost lovely – “Along this river lovers seek sanctuary” – but it is already tainted by the unnamable “thing” from the first line, and besides we soon learn that they are seeking sanctuary from “the poison of revenge gone native in the grass.” The next image is of a girl who “admires her half-exposed breasts,” while her spine is wracked and her knees bleed onto the snow. There’s a distance throughout the poem –the way it disorients, how you never know what’s around the next corner, the way you’re constantly kept from understanding the whole of anything.

The nightmarish quality of the poem is further invoked by “a calamitous dream of creation.” This phrase captures so much of the everything-at-once quality of the poem: how can a dream be a calamity? how could creation be a disaster? whose dream are we living in? I thought about origin myths and how Chaos so often is personified, a necessary counterpart to the ordering of the universe. (But is the Chaos the same as calamity?) Next there is a man, unnamed – we meet his “rib” first, possibly a biblical allusion? And finally there is the first mention of the speaker, who is not even introduced as an “I,” but as an “unmade being.” “

Throughout the poem, the speaker cannot be placed or located. The speaker doesn’t seem to even know who he is: “This experience has made me unnatural.” They are so alienated from their own body that they identify the “muscle between forefinger and thumb” as their true other. They describe themselves flailing in the womb: “My ripped seam the unsewn hole of Nothing.”

The speaker is most present in Part 3, which begins with “Another year has passed. I’ve returned to the place of my birth.” But we soon learn this place also belongs to the enemy, with whom the speaker feels more of a connection than to their own hand: “perhaps we are twins / -- tormentor, whose bright eyes are the shade of mine, mired in the same / bad blood.”

Part III further illustrates this twinning: “At sunrise, I will loosen some more of his flesh, / drive the point home into the molten cast / pupil, break the large bones. The creature is my echo / and my future.” These lines suggest that the speaker is the one in control. However, their relationship is not nearly so easy: “I am his nightfall, his abandoned grief / and my scarred surface never heals.” The speaker and their enemy are each other’s reflection, inextricable from one another. I’m also struck by how the enemy is described both as something so alive and threating -- a gorge, a pulsing chasm, a creature with inside-out organs that hunts the speaker -- as well as an object whose large bones can be broken. It makes me realize how everything is both maker and surface in this poem. A confusion of textures that makes me think of the title, “Riverflesh.” The slipperiness of it. I think about the way that terror knows no boundaries – it is both object and monster and echo and breasts lying on a filthy mass of rags. I think about how terror can be a twin, more real than your own body because it’s everywhere. Milking the afterbirth.