"Diving Into the Wreck" - Commentary by Don Raymond, Jr.

... and I tried to explain to her last night that we are all alone, born alone, die alone, and - in spite of True Romance magazines - we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way.

                        -- Hunter S. Thompson

There is a poem which has haunted me since I first read it, twenty years ago. In “Diving Into the Wreck” Adrienne Rich describes an explorer preparing for her mission. The first stanza begins with a check-list of scuba equipment, then ends with a sudden, almost bitter turn:

I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his

assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner

but here alone.

This contrast runs through the remainder of the poem: loneliness versus teamwork, darkness and light. This contrast has also run through my own life: there is no one else. I have to do this alone ... no help is coming, and none can be expected.  But for all that we might wish to be a part of Cousteau’s “assiduous team,” there is also a certain rebellious streak of pride in the solitary challenge of the lone diver.  After all, that’s what poets, explorers, scientists, do – go off alone into the wordless places and bring back something that might be the truth.  And there is a price to be paid for that.

Kay Ryan – Terrible Portents: Guest Post by Don Raymond, Jr.

That Vase of Lilacs & Blue China Doorknob

Poetry is a highly personal thing.  Every once in a while, you find a poem that clicks, and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck; you get that strange feeling like someone’s just walked across your grave, like the poet “sat behind a million pair of eyes and told them how they saw” as David Bowie said about Bob Dylan.  It’s exhilarating, that connection between two strangers.  It can also be a little frightening.

The first time I read “That Vase of Lilacs,” I got a world-class case of the screaming heebie-jeebies.  Kay Ryan frightens the heck out of me in ways that Stephen King can only dream of.

Prairie Queen of the Jackalopes - Don Raymond

NB: In order to promote Architrave poems and poets, this blog will release both poet bios and my comments on their poems into the wild. Enjoy~


Read the full text of the poem by clicking the image or purchase it here.


The Poem:
A title like this one puts readers on notice - this poem does not take such stories seriously. Or does it? Humor is a powerful tool when you want to express something True; it's a form of "slant," as in Tell all the Truth but tell it Slant -- / ... The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind -- . Emily Dickinson hardly ever left her room but she knew the same thing Don Raymond knows: people don't like to be challenged about what they believe. We don't like to acknowledge the amount of subjectivity built into our own world view. Then we get out into a wide open space like the Nevada grasslands and our minds start to wander, we see or hear things we can't reconcile with how we believe the world works. In fact, when you're alone, out there / under the sky, you could believe / almost anything. That's being human, and that's True.


The Poet:
Don Raymond, Jr. lives in San Jose, CA, where he runs an Egyptology Museum, a fact which never fails to surprise and delight him. In what little spare time that leaves, he tutors math and science, and serves as mediator in the Machiavellian feline politics of his household. His work has appeared in Poetalk and An Electric Tragedy. He also once didn't make a left turn at Albuquerque. Questions about jackalopes, Egyptology, or chemistry can be sent to Don60223 -at- gmail.com.

On the Application of Poetry - Guest Post by Don Raymond, Jr.

Sarah Lindsay’s What All It Takes

from Primate Behavior (Knopf, 1997)

November, 2007: the last phone call of the last hour of the day before leaving for Thanksgiving was my doctor telling me I had been diagnosed with diabetes. 

            Over the following weeks of measuring-cup starvation, I looked for ways to assign meaning to what had happened. I didn’t need an answer to the existential “why.”  I knew “why” – sugar was not one of the four food groups, no matter how much I wanted it to be.  Ditto for coffee, cholesterol, and cigarettes. What I needed was a way to give this meaning, to help me feel this was more than simply a struggle for continued existence.

            I found myself reciting Sarah Linday’s “What All It Takes,” over and over again. Sometimes in the morning, to brace myself for another day of measured almonds and banana snacks; sometimes in the midst of a panic attack brought on by too much exercise. And far too often, murmured under my breath in anger at the world.

            As the glucose meter read too high one moment, too low the next, I would mutter: “Up and down its red and blue chutes / my defective blood bumps / Oreos and gumballs one hour, / famished soap bubbles the next.” Describing red blood cells as “Oreos and gumballs” made the sickness tolerable.  If she could laugh at it, could sum it up in such words, the least I could do was survive. The least I could do was marvel at the mounds of pharmaceutical junk I was producing - the twice-daily blood sugar readings, the lancets for drawing blood, special strips for reading sugar levels, a mountain of biologically hazardous garbage, all to prop up my continued existence. I had become a medical cottage industry. All this stuff … “Christmas survived, / I find with the special sugarless candy’s / mild laxative effect time to wonder / at what all it takes to keep me up.”

I had been hurt, in ways that would not heal. I had reached the time of my life where ready access to hospitals was a major lifestyle decision. Though I’d always lived within walking distance of a liquor store, the pipe dream of rugged self-sufficiency was gone for good. “… in an Ice Age cave I’d be dead. / In a Roman villa with household gods and servants / I’d be dead. In a Gothic wheatfield town, / even before the plague came I’d be dead.”

            I made it through, and in no large part because someone else had before me. Someone had faced the same thing, and won, and Sarah Lindsay told me about it in language so vital, so heartbreakingly true, that it had to be true for me, as well.


For more on Sarah Lindsey, check out her page at the Poetry Foundation.

For more about Don Raymond, Jr., visit his work for Architrave.