Sounds and Other Musings in “Riverflesh”

I tried reading this poem while on break at my retail job, hunched in my car over a salad with the sun beating down on me, hoping that no coworkers would spot me shoveling kale into my face with a look of obsession. Because when I read this, I went somewhere else. When I read this poem, it did not matter that I was in a parking lot. It felt like I was back in the woods in Ohio, negotiating the violence between dusk and dawn, sensing the smell of dead fish before it hit my nose. I recognized the beauty, like I was part of the poem’s atmosphere, and also the carnage spilling off the page.

I felt so bloody when I read this. It is a poem about birth, but birth is so many terrible things. Anyone who has been born is complicit in the violence of creation. I mean, a girl crawls in the snow with bloody knees, red mixing with white. Her spine is wracked -- even the word “wracked” makes me sit more upright. “Wracked” is harsh, not far from “whacked” or “wrecked.” It is a hard, snapping word full of motion and puzzlement. People are “racked” with guilt, but spines? Wracked? I can practically see her body bending into impossible shapes, and perhaps it because this line is so early in the poem and therefore so close to images of the river, but all I can see is a fish being violently flung into a bucket, a fish whose spine is disposable. The girl becomes an object, a disposable thing by association.

Whether it is a sound (the tonal qualities of the words on the page is a whole other conversation, one I will dive into in a minute) or an image of desire, there is an atmosphere of beauty present in this poem. Take, if you will, lines 18 and 19 from the first stanza: “Lovers come and go / But the true other is a muscle between forefinger and thumb.” To set it in context, the speaker has just been born. His eyes are a desert (line 17), his face is inhuman, but damn it if he’s not a newborn baby. Yes, lovers come and go. They are seedy and they stick around for only so long. But this baby -- this newborn whose eyes are as deep, expansive and intriguing as a desert -- is going nowhere. Lines 18 and 19 are my favorite in this whole work, and I’ll tell you why: I love the image of a mother holding her newborn after the calamitous, destructive, fear-ridden and truly terrible experience of giving birth. I love what I see: a mother (no longer just the “girl” of the poem) holds his little hand in hers, I love knowing what is inside her head, that she is aware of the impermanence of lovers. I love that she finds her baby’s thumb and forefinger flesh divine; he is her “true other.”

Now, I want to talk about musical language in the poem. I can’t not… Did you know that little cilia (hairs in your throat) move as you read anything and everything? We are always mimetically engaging with the text in some form or another. You’re never reading silently. That’s why poetry especially has to have its own soundtrack.

Marriott's work is dripping in sound/fueled by it, but I want to first point to Stanza 1, lines 21-23, and talk about what is happening tonally and rhythmically.

The torrent leashes down to seal-skin

A girl throws herself in the river

From her extracted enamel walk pock marked crowds

Tone: Alliteration is one thing, but this is a shift in the soft palate. The sounds of the words invite the mouth to perform as we read. First, we start with a  closed mouth (“Sss” as in seal-skin). Next, we transition to a softly open mouth (“ehh” as in extracted enamel). Finally, we end with our tongue coming in to punctuate with a hard “ck” sound.

Rhythm: I hear that line 23 is in in 4/4 meter. Here are the beats:

1 = Extracted, 2 = enamel, 3 = Pock marked, 4 = crowds.

Why does this matter? It’s the language of the poem. It’s the current underneath the surface of the water that shapes meaning. It happens beneath the level of most people’s awareness, but it is there and it is as active as the molecules shifting in the air around you.

Oh boy. Thanks for reading.