Hook Through the Eye
Poem Review: “Sestina: Writer’s Block” by Carl Vaughan, II
(Note: because the narrator’s gender is not established in the poem, I will be using they/their pronouns for the narrator)
Carl Vaughan’s poem “Sestina: Writer’s Block” is deceptively titled. I normally stay away from poems or stories about Writer’s Block, simply because it’s such an overdone topic, but this poem is different. Vaughan likens Writer’s Block to a woman sleeping in the narrator’s bed. The relationship between the narrator and the “woman” is complicated. Deeply so.
Before we begin with the poem breakdown, here’s a quick explanation of what a “sestina” is. According to the Poetry Foundation, a sestina is “a complex French verse form, usually unrhymed, consisting of six stanzas of six lines each and a three-line envoy. The end words of the first stanza are repeated in a different order as end words in each of the subsequent five stanzas; the closing envoy contains all six words, two per line, placed in the middle and at the end of the three lines.” Vaughan’s poem uses these words/sounds as his end words: window, dark, baby, fish, awake/wake, and go.
Acupuncture ice tapping my window
beside my bed in the besotted dark
makes the same sound (scratching, scraping) baby
birds make as they’re being ground into fish
meal. Beak, glass, and her breath keeps me awake
and for a moment, I think of Van Gogh.
The first stanza establishes the scene for us. The narrator lies awake in bed, listening to the ice outside the window and “her” breathing. The narrator can’t sleep; these sounds are keeping them awake. While this scene is a familiar one, Vaughan chooses specific adjectives to set the mood. The ice is described as “acupuncture” and then like “scratching, scraping” baby birds being ground up to feed fish. What is it about the ice that makes the narrator think of it as possibly therapeutic? What is it about the ice that also makes the narrator think of dying infant birds? These opposing sounds come to the narrator through the “besotted” dark. Why is the dark besotted? What (or who) is it infatuated with? And why does this scene make the narrator think of Van Gogh?
With “her” breath sounding through the dark, the narrator travels through the night, through thoughts, through their own soul. They speculate on whether you can see the soul through the eyes and whether she notices that their soul’s eyes are not yet awake. They are awake only enough to search through the besotted darkness with their hands outstretched, hoping to “tap-find” whatever it is they’re searching for.
The narrator believes that she is aware, even in sleep, that the narrator is a little fish, an unwitting meal for a baby seal. The baby seal is described as “unclubbed.” Why? Why is it important for us to know this? Is it lucky to not have been clubbed to death? Is it going to be clubbed in the future? Who is the baby seal in the narrator’s life? Is she the baby seal?
The narrator moves on from this image, deciding that when she wakes up, the narrator will convince her that they will follow her wherever she goes. “Convince” is an interesting word to use here. Why do they have to convince her of this?
The narrator then says they are the pilot fish to her shark. This is also an interesting comparison. Pilot fish are a striped fish that engages in a mutualistic relationship with sharks. They tag alongside sharks to guard themselves against threats, using the shark’s reputation as the ultimate predator to their advantage. In return, the pilot fish keeps the shark free from parasites and excess food. They sometimes even swim into their shark’s open mouth to eat any food debris. It’s a mutually dependent relationship, albeit one with vastly unbalanced power dynamics. The narrator places themselves into the pilot fish role, which is obviously the riskier position between the two. The shark could turn on the pilot fish at any time. The shark only tolerates the pilot fish because they provide a service. It is the pilot fish who must trust. It’s the pilot fish sacrificing their safety.
I wish she’d throw me like you’d throw a bait fish
back in when it failed to catch a bigger fish.
Or better, let me put my mark on your skin. Don’t wake.
I want my triumph on display like a flag in a window,
or art on a refrigerator. From the mouths of babes.
Insinuations of where I’ve gone
roam homelessly between us in the dark.
The narrator likens themselves to bait fish a little further on in the poem, wishing she’d throw them back into the water. The narrator has failed in their duty; they did not catch a bigger fish. What, or who, is the big fish? But then, “better yet,” the narrator wishes that she’d let the narrator “mark” her skin, a sign of triumph for the world to see. In what ways will they mark her skin? With love bites? Bruises? Cuts? Words upon a page? And why would the marks be “triumphant?” Would they be a sign that the narrator has finally made an impact on her? That she now belongs to them? That they can now claim some ownership over her?
The narrator watches her sleep “through the darkest dreams of shoving her hook through my fish’s eye.” Is she dreaming these dreams, or is the narrator? Does she want to hook the narrator…or does the narrator want her to hook them? And this manner of hooking a fish is not the ideal way to hook a fish. It’s painful and potentially a lethal injury. So why is this the method of hooking dreamt about?
The narrator complains that, even after being hooked horribly through the eye, “she’ll never let me go where she goes, so I surf in her wake, chasing the words that evade like baby turtles during their one nightly window.” It’s a clunky line, perhaps due to its desperation not to break sestina form. Even so, it’s an intriguing image.
Still, the dark evaporates like dew on my window
sill. The light may see my fish gutted and my baby
still uncaught, left to roam free on the page as I lie awake.
The final lines of the poem end the scene. We wandered through the night with the narrator, hopelessly searching for ways to solidify the relationship between the narrator and “her.” But now it’s morning, and the dew evaporates in the morning light. The narrator’s baby was not caught. She’s still roaming the narrator’s blank notebook.
Read the entire poem below, then come back here and let me know what you think. Did you like this fresh take on the idea of Writer’s Block? Do you think it was simply about Writer’s Block? I’ll admit it took me a few reads before I fully understood that it wasn’t about a philandering lover. Although it certainly still could be. Was the narrator comparing his complicated love life to the complicated affair he’s having with his Writing Muse? Are his love troubles distracting him from writing? Is his lover his muse? There’s a lot to speculate on. Let me know what you think in the comments below.
