Thoughts on being born in response to "Riverflesh"

Thoughts on being born in response to “Riverflesh” by David Marriott

Reading this poem through the first time, I was struck by the collage of images it created in my mind. It was like looking at an abstract painting and trying to determine which parts were the body and which parts were the environment. The title: “Riverflesh” compounds the body with the environment, and this continues in descriptions of “eyes as a desert” and “whose grin unfolds like dark butterfly wings in the wilderness.” After reading it through a few more times, I decided that the compounding of the human body and nature was not meant to be de-coded. The river, the snow, the unworldly swamps: they may all correlate to different parts of the human body but what made this interesting was not that I could puzzle out exactly which bit matched which. It was interesting because this was a way of describing the world and thinking about physicality in a different way than what I’m used to.

  After the line: “let him embrace my unmade being”, I started to read this poem from the perspective of a baby in the womb. To a fetus, the body of the mother is the whole world, and their relationship with physical space (if they have one, as this poem suggests) is unique. I thought a line in the second stanza of part I illustrated this well: “After she conceives the earth will burst and her yellow eye will baffle the corridor as she fastens the veils of dawn”. I read this as what a fetus would see when being born. The world outside the mother appears at the opening of the birth canal, the yellow eye is the sun, and it baffles. If we could remember being born, how would we make sense of it? How could we conceive of our entire world being inside another? Somehow, we did, we’re all here now.

 Other questions that Riverflesh brought up for me were around the idea of being unwanted. There is no indication in this poem that this baby feels wanted. The lines: “The materials a nightmare, not my fault” and “The wronged child not in words but in desire” were particularly heartbreaking. That the child has to remind us, itself, it’s parents, that being born was “not my fault” suggests that it has felt at some point that it was. “This experience has made me unnatural, where he goes, he knows that I will follow,” ends part I, and is reminiscent of the predatory feeling in part III: “he hunts me through the ice; the wreck of snow melting us to nothing as day breaks onto storm.” This poem has many violent moments: a wracked spine, bloody knees, an open rib, fever-drenched bestial fear, extracted enamel, ripped seam, bride snatching, hematomas, a monster devoured by his brother, workers swallowing misery and lead, to name a few. These moments of physical violence make me consider how this poem might explore how someone thinks about their own personhood when they were not only unwanted, but brought into a violent world through violent means.  

Part II stood out to me for several reasons. One is that it’s shorter than parts I and III, it’s in six two-line stanzas instead of two twenty-line stanzas or two six-line and two five-line stanzas. The lines themselves are also shorter, and there is no ‘I’, instead there is a ‘we’: “because we parented the creature, here ruin is the sign.” I read this part from the perspective of the parents, and I was struck by how short it was. It didn’t create the same kaleidoscope of images that parts I and III did. Maybe because the experience of being born is not considered as often as the experience of giving birth, so the baby’s perspective was given more color. Part II felt distant, as everything the baby experienced goes “Spoken but unheard”. If the baby expressed any or all of its thoughts, they were not interpreted by the parents, they just heard screaming: “these black, mourning sounds unsleeve the cauls as fetus-gifts.”

I leave this poem thinking about how the unknown experience of being conceived and being born linger with us. Part III ends saying: “the creature is my echo and my future. But I am his nightfall, his abandoned grief, and my scarred surface never heals.” How might the trauma of being born affect our lives?