These Things Add Up
Poem Review: “Late Bloomer” by A. Martine
“Late Bloomer” by A. Martine hits hard. It’s a gut punch. It captures something universally felt: the slippage of time, the gnawing of unease, the suddenly coherent thought that I don’t know what I’m doing.
The poem begins with the phrase “these things add up.” This will be repeated, intruding on the narrator’s words again and again. The repetition of “these things add up” reads almost like a chant. The narrator is going through her young life (she’s presumably in her mid-twenties) ceaselessly chanting this phrase. She tabulates every flinch, every mistake, every awkward encounter, every instance of suffering. She hopes that this will all change when she’s older, specifically when she’s twenty-seven. But does she really believe that anything will actually change?”
“I want to be twenty-seven / the only way left is down.”
She hopes that by then, by the ripe age of twenty-seven, she will have earned herself skill, that she will finally hold herself accountable. She hopes that she will have either learned how to love herself or else have made the decision not to. But, of course, “these things add up.” We’re again reminded that all she has been doing in her short life is trying to escape the life she has.
“Escape so much you end up on trajectories of fugue, hoping momentum will buoy you where accountability did not.”
There are multiple definitions for the word “fugue.” Fugue, in music, is “a musical composition in which one or two themes are repeated or imitated by successively entering voices and contrapuntally developed in a continuous interweaving of the voice parts.” In psychiatry, fugue is “a disturbed state of consciousness in which the one affected seems to perform acts in full awareness but upon recovery cannot recollect the acts performed.”
Both of these definitions work here. The narrator continually questions the life she’s performed. Why did she do that? Why did she say that? Why can’t she get it together? She’s trapped inside a stupor where she’s somehow both fully in control of her actions and also somehow unable to account for why she’s doing the things she’s doing. She’s too inside of her self and too outside of her self, too close and too distant to get a true conclusion on what is actually going on. But, at the same time, we can feel the “momentum” or the rhythm of these two opposing views of herself. The closeness and distance have been taken up by each other, weaving themselves into a complex melody with the endless refrain of “these things add up.”
“It’s that infernal sound again, the sound of your conscience gone hollow, gone slippery, gone bright, your fingers struggle around its form, its shape, its contours.”
The narrator also struggles with articulation. She can’t find the exact words to describe how she’s feeling. She can’t choose the best image, the best simile, the best metaphor. She’s feeling around in the dark, or, rather, she’s struggling between too many choices, too many colors, too many words. Her verbs don’t quite add up. Is she floating or swimming? Is she jumping on the trampoline, or is she stepping into the patchy, hostile grass? The images are not clear because she’s not clear. And, worst of all, she knows she’s not clear. She doesn’t know what it is she should be doing. Does she need to slow down her life to take better stock of what it is she has? Or does she need to swim faster, moving towards a new goal, a new life, a new her? Of course, it’s both that she wants. She’s caught somewhere between action and the rest that follows action.
So what’s keeping her from the correct choice? According to her, it’s earned, willful skill, accountability, caring too much, parenthetical tangents, losing sight of her conscience, suffering… But, ultimately, it’s her resolve to continually step onto the trampoline, searching for the temporary high that comes from jumping into the air. Because, even if it feels like you’re floating, what goes up must inevitably come down.
As a 29-year-old, I really appreciate this poem. It captures the feeling of your mid-to-late twenties. I feel like a child — messy, inarticulate, scrambling for something solid — but the signs of aging are already coming. A silver hair here. An earth-rocking failure there. With age comes seemingly permanent life choices. Is this the career I want? Is this who I truly want to be? Is it too late now to make a change? Somehow, amid the muddle this poem creates, Martine articulates this slippery time of life wonderfully.
Check out the full poem at the link below. Let me know what you think.
Link: https://pubsecure.lucidpress.com/crackthespine260/#ZZUYfHRA8ABk
