The Most Important Meal - An Occasional Feature

"I try to read a poem every morning with my coffee. It’s the most important meal of the day." - Novelist Sue Monk Kidd

I recently happened on the comment above and thought it a good idea. I have, accordingly, placed several volumes of verse on my breakfast table and resolved to treat myself to a poem with my first mug of java. Today I took up Kelly Belmonte's chapbook, Three Ways of Searching and began with the untitled piece below:

Cross-legged too long
on damp wooden dock,
until your ship slips
over the horizon's curve.
I shiver, too tired to rail.

Three Ways consists of short poems, mostly haikus but some, like this one, push the form just slightly while retaining its spare discipline. Call them jai-kind-of's, if you will. The title piece of the collection identifies the trio of search-engines as hounds, eagles, and silence. This device then provides the three sections of the book. I may be wrong, but it fells to me as if the individual poems within each section loosely express the governing metaphor. 

Take middle section, "The way of hounds." The characters here "sniff" and "pounce," they "follow" and "run." The actors in the first two pieces are, in fact, dogs; the last one, a child. Belmonte's angular language sketches the coursing hunt for truth; her hounds are, indeed, bred out of the Spartan kind.

Similarly, "The way of eagles" views in panorama. Two of the six poems focus on birds - crows, in fact. A single perspective shows entire landscapes. Indeed, the final entry embraces all of sinful humanity including the self. 

So it is not surprising to recognize that "Cross-legged" (Belmonte does not give it a title but to rest the reader I will go with the Jane Austen-convention and use the opening words) takes in everything from a disappearing ship to the dock from which it sets sail. No, that's not correct: It takes in everything from shore-keeper and passenger. 

On one level, not too complex: A lover (spouse? parent? friend?) gazes until the beloved's boat (steamer? fishing vessel? cruise ship?) disappears from sight. The speaker expresses fatigue and sorrow. That's enough, but I believe there's more.

It begins with discomfort: "cross-legged too long/on damp wooden dock." Simple enough: squatting lotus-legged on unupholstered planks has put the narrator's feet to sleep; the hips protest the position and the buttocks provide the backbeat. But look again: two images - a "cross" and "wood." I'm more preacher than poet or professor so perhaps I see Christ-figures everywhere but this one seems sound to me. And what has dampened the boards? Water, one presumes; or blood? No, the narrator is not Christ and the jetty is not Calvary, except to the extent that every sufferer is Christ because the cross embraces all suffering, and every lonely outpost is the Place of the Skull because every loss is today's ration of death.

"Until your ship slips/over the horizon's curve." Note the sibilant subject-verb nexus: they hiss in the mouth and ear; there's something furtive in the act, and something angry in the sound. As the smokestacks sink below the horizon the poem's stereoscopic perspective suddenly turns singular: The boat has not just gone out of sight; it has abandoned the knowable world. Down here in South Texas we say the land is so flat you can watch a dog run away for three days, but the salt prairie swallows object whole. The abandonment of those lines hits hard. "En una noche oscura." "'Nay' is worse from God than from all others." 

Then the discomfort returns: "I shiver, too tired to rail." Cold and fatigue, but they bite below the skin's surface. Somehow a warm bath and a nap won't fix this. Look at the last word of the poem: "rail." Belmonte makes one word do the work of two, and one part of speech do double-duty as well. Rail has two meanings in English, etymologically unrelated: It means to revile or scold in harsh language, and it means a wooden bar extending between two posts as a guard or barrier. 

So the two inhabitants of the poem have parted on bad terms and the speaker has lost the emotional energy required to protest, but also the energy to defend some relational line in the sand. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" But the second sense, the raw physical image of splintery wood, reverts to the opening image of "cross-legged." I can liner on this gibbet no longer. The head slumps on the breast; the Crucified one gives up the ghost. God yanks the sun below the world's curve and darkness descends ahead of schedule. 

But because of that, the poem ends in hope.