‘Sexton Texts During the Polar Vortex’
— Nix Thérèse
I love when poets create a form from the technology we currently have. To condense an image or moment to a text requires the voice to speak intentionally in a small space, but also allows for a sense of spillover. It’s not easily managed, but ‘Sexton Texts During the Polar Vortex’ really works to make condensed moments of familial discord sing, both in their singularity and their associations.
The mother wants to “taste the throbbing / veiny eels her crooked lovers forsook / drink from blind lakes of their leaving, / undo their digging.” These vivid notes on the mother’s desire are so heartbreaking. She doesn’t just want to go back to her lovers, but wants to undo their marks. Implied in the drinking of the “lakes of their leaving” is her being so filled to the brim that she won’t have this ache anymore. The speaker giving us her mother’s emotional interiority so easily speaks to the depth of their compassion. They can build whole scenes for us, knowing both what the mother does and why. Yet my favorite moment of the poem comes from inside the speaker: “how much silt I packed into the hole / no matter… / trenches never fill / never unslope / else they cease being / soldier’s shallow shelter.” To fall into the emotional trenches of connection with someone can create a symbiosis that’s both shelter and threat. But the speaker seems to know intrinsically that losing this closeness will mean losing it all. How can you pull back when your mother seems so close to floating away in her own unprocessed trauma already?
The grip on the mother feels so tenuous that it’s somewhat jarring to be introduced to the father after five whole texts, but it’s certainly memorable: “every day my father fell six / feet into a vat of tar.” The image is viscerally agonizing enough that the discussion of intentionality is really of little consequence. If you touched a doorknob and “steam rose / from the brass,” it would be alarming no matter how you sliced it. There’s a strong clarity of voice in addressing the trauma of seeing your father slowly kill himself in this way, yet the staggered lines and jumbled ordering of the five texts regarding him speaks to how this is being dragged out of the speaker, rather than freely given. The fourth text of the set is the last moment, and in it we’re given “back to tar streets.” This opens two main ideas for me. The streets will still exist even after the father is gone and the family will have to face them knowing this. I can also see his back lain over the streets instead of cushioned in a coffin, a bed, or any other comfortable place of rest. It is both a grounding moment of letting us know how the tar was used, but also a floating one because now we don’t know who’s making the turn (now that the context of three isn’t as linked). We only have the streets in their vast and spooky darkness, the “slick black” that lies under rock salt and pulls men under.