POEM OF THE DAY: Elizabeth Alexander's "At the Beach"
You may know Elizabeth Alexander as the poet who wrote and performed the poem "Praise Song for the Day" at Obama's 2009 inauguration. She just published a memoir, The Light of the
World (Grand Central Publishing 2015), about the sudden death of her husband that I've heard is very powerful and I look forward to reading. For today, though, I wanted to post an older poem of hers, "At the Beach," from Body of Life (Tia Chucha Press, 1996) that I found recently while clicking through Poetry Magazine's archives.
It's a poem situated in the recent aftermath of the AIDs epidemic, a fact we can ascertain from the date of its publication and from its content—the way the speaker envisions "the virus" as "single, swimming paisley, a sardine / with serrated fins and a neon spine"—the way this beast that killed her two friends is given its own space in the poem, becomes its own character almost, wriggling there beneath her friend's T-shirt-turned-X-ray. And yet, of course, what makes this poem so meaningful is the way it transcends its own immediate context and becomes universal. In the second stanza, we are told where the speaker is: "....on a train, thinking about my friends / and watching two women talk in sign language." She is struck by the physicality of this sign-language conversation, "the energy and heft their talk / generates," and how this physicality is akin to the presence of her friends in the photograph. They are still there somehow; they disrupt the very air of the train car. Alexander seems to be saying something about the physicality of an image, and of language—the sign language exhanged between the women on the train and the poem itself—as well as of grief.
In the third stanza, the speaker speaks to the friends in the photograph directly. In the first stanza, they are "[Her] friends, two dead, one low / on T-cells"; in the second stanza, the speaker subtly shifts into addressing them as "you," just once, so that you, the reader, barely notice. By the third stanza, she asks, "Did you tea-dance that day? Write poems / in the sunlight? Vamp with strangers?" Now she is speaking to the dead, and to the near-dead, without apology. They are right there, after all, in the train car right beside her, available for questioning. The end of the poem brings this point home, in its allusion to "Ajax's black" (from Toni Morrison's Sula), and the way the speaker "calibrate[s] / the weight of your beautiful bones, the weight / of your elbow, Melvin, // on Darrell's brown shoulder."
I read this as an extremely hopeful poem about the power of language and image to bring back those we've lost. Not a resuscitation of course, but a presence with weight, heft, skin and bones—someone, or something, we can talk to.
