| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
YOU FINALLY CONTACT ME
Sherry Saye
(Melic Review RoundTable)
Too late,
the northernmost tip
of the Divide Country falls,
a forest in a moist corridor,
an oversized crack in the dry grasslands
where fir and pine
thrive. Cherry Creek
trips on the hot ridge
and tumbles on its way to Denver.
There’s not a canyon on this earth
you don’t occupy. You gave them all to me,
deep constants.
Fertile wombs
were spooky.
Pseudo-Buddha. Rapist priest.
Guitarist who needed to go to Spain.
I remember your fit,
always up and to the...
was it right?
Go away
from below the cliffs in the shadows
in those boyish wrinkled pants
stained with all of our secrets, like when
the Colombian rain
came through the window on us.
Judge Wayne Miller’s comment: “‘You Finally Contact Me’ is also a love poem, but engages the subject of love quite differently from ‘Sacrifices, Leaves and Whippoorwills.’ The speaker in this poem spends much of her time distancing herself emotionally from the absent lover (and love) to whom the poem is addressed. This begins with a symbolic attention to landscape, turning chasms into symbols of absence and loss. Then the poem slips into a comedic and ironic distancing. Once erotic passion has made ‘fertile wombs / ...spooky,’ the addressee is almost ridiculed for his similarity to clichéd icons of male sexuality: ‘Pseudo-Buddha. Rapist priest. / Guitarist who needed to go to Spain’; perhaps more importantly, the speaker also seems to be making fun of her attraction to these ‘types.’ By this point, the affair in question has been diminished to the point of near-dismissal, and though I’m not crazy about the idea of pants ‘stained with... secrets,’ I do love how the specificity and unexplained intimacy of the closing detail--‘the Colombian rain / came through the window on us’--suddenly reveals the speaker’s self-protecting evasions for what they are.”
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