Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil: Dreams, time, and being a daughter

My favorite poem in this book, up there with Bengal Tiger, When you Select the Daughter Card, Sea Church, and Penguin Valentine, is Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate One Second Before Waking Up. Not only is it after a Salvador Dalí painting that I know, it’s after a Salvador Dalí painting that I’ve for a long time considered my favorite. I first saw this painting in my high school Spanish class, when we were studying Spanish artists, a new artist each week or two. I liked it for the aesthetic: two tigers leaping out of a fish’s mouth towards a sleeping woman, a floating shotgun pointed at her, the moment before she wakes up. It made something in my disaffected teenage heart happy for whatever reason. Seeing this painting again in Nezhukumatathil’s poem also made my disaffected young- adult heart happy, for the way it conceptualized time and dreams.

Here is the mouth of a fish / wide with wonder at the twin tigers leaping out/ from it- roaring with the ocean salt till they’ve soared above // a floating pomegranate, a heart full of seed. / In twenty-four / microseconds, a stick of dynamite will ex- // plode after its fuse burned down. Houseflies flick / their wings once / every three milliseconds. Even that fly is / long gone // to the other side of the yard in the time it / took to write flick. / Giant tortoises and compact discs last one / hundred years.

I have the kindle version of this book, which means the spacing is probably wrong, so I apologize if this is not accurate to how the lines appear in the printed text. But I love how she deals with interior and exterior time in this poem, the interior time of dreams and the exterior time of reality. All of the multitudes that can be contained in a microsecond and then the part about tortoises and compact discs lasting one hundred years- as well as the billions of years it would take for “the last waxy smudge of me to stop loving you”, which I thought was very sweet. The fly is gone by the time its presence is vocalized by the word flick but the tortoise and the CD will be here a hundred years from now, even though we will be long gone, the CD will be like the word flick vocalizing our presence. It’s kind of sweet until you remember that a hundred years from now, a CD (already being replaced by digital music) will be nothing but pollution. Like in several of her other poems, the theme of environmental pollution is brought up. It takes a billion years for an ocean to form, and according to the internet a million years for one glass bottle to decompose. It takes a thousand glass bottles to make an ocean.

When You Select the Daughter Card got me thinking about my own identity as a daughter, which has changed as I’ve gotten older, but remains an important part of myself. Seeing a daughter card appear in a Tarot deck would be so cool: “the power flowing / through the Daughter is oceanic, the / rupture / of pillow lava on the sea floor” There’s often not a lot of power accredited to daughters as compared to sons: traditionally sons were the ones who inherited, who carried on the family name, got educated, etc. and daughters stayed home and then eventually got married and absorbed into the family of their husband, “symbolizing a harmony between earth and the dazzle of the sea”. I appreciate how the quiet and fluctuating identity of being a daughter is characterized by the ocean, which is actually very noisy and deeply rooted.

I also like the characterization of the ocean as a maternal figure, both in this poem and in Sea Church: “I ask for the grace / of a new freckle / on my cheek, the lift / of blue and my mother’s / soapy skin to greet me.” although the ocean is compared to a church in this poem, I read the mother’s soapy skin as part of the ocean here. The line about sometimes being a mermaid in Daughter Card I read as being the daughter of the ocean, and sometimes walking on land as being either the wife of land or as being also the daughter of land, if the husband or the father is considered land. Walking on the edge of two families, in balance, is what daughters are supposed to do.

This book had me at Self Portrait as a Scallop, when a tightly clamped shell with a hundred eyes (did not know scallops had that many eyes) gets cracked open by a sea-bird and resigns to it. What a great way to start a book of poems, as cracking open the inside of a previously silent and unknown thing, with a hundred eyes worth of observations to be had: “I’m no longer silent.  None of them    told me // if you were hungry enough—the small hinge // of my umbo       would creak and sigh.”