sand, and berried

Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher
By: Barbara Guest


I just said I didn’t know
And now you are holding me
In your arms,
How kind.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher.
Yet around the net I am floating
Pink and pale blue fish are caught in it,
They are beautiful,
But they are not good for eating.
Parachuted, my love, could carry us higher
Than this mid-air in which we tremble,
Having exercised our arms in swimming,
Now the suspension, you say,
Is exquisite. I do not know.
There is coral below the surface,
There is sand, and berried
Like pomegranates grow.
This wide net, I am treading water
Near it, bubbles are rising and salt
Drying on my lashes, yet I am no nearer
Air than water. I am closer to you
Than land and I am in a stranger ocean
Than I wished. 


But... but parachutes can't and don't take us higher. They only lessen the impact of our plummeting fall through space. I'm guessing she knows  "my love could carry us higher," her love being the only thing that could actually lift them up from this suspended state. Yet she stubbornly inserts that second comma and assumes this reassuring and slightly patronizing tone by addressing her lover, allowing her to sublimate that knowledge and depend on this object which is external to her to save them from the fall. But what is "the fall"?
Is it falling in love or is it falling towards their ultimate demise and end? Perhaps she doesn't know either.


There is no doubt that the suspension throughout the poem is truly exquisite. But it is the concurrent ambivalence and trepidation which buoys it to that state which makes me tremble too.


Anyway, having filched... nabbed... pilfered, in the most unceremonious of fashions, Barbie Guest's intellectual property for this blog's title, it is my hope that to some degree, this blog may provide the same kind of pleasure dappled with perturbation that she expresses here. Just for myself, if for no one else. But all other interpretations and readings of what I put on here... or of life and death and the meaning of the universe... are also welcome here too! Here's to nothing! *waves. jumps. and plummets headlong through the interwebs.*


M