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.