I’ve been reading the poems in Gary Fincke’s new poetry collection, For Now, We Have Been Spared, recently published by Slant Books. The poems draw me in, lure me into sitting with them. I’m especially drawn to the seven “sequences” in the book: series of six to sixteen poems elaborating a particular motif. There’s no point in trying to dash through them all in a single post, so I’m going to focus on one that I find especially engaging. It’s called “Plummeting.”
“Plummeting” consists of thirteen numbered poems, each envisioning some kind of falling. Poem #1 begins in a child’s dream of clowns: “Some are seated on nothing, plummeting / From unseen planes.” When the child wakes, he imitates the clowns:
When he holds his mouth exactly like theirs As he stands in his father’s floppy shoes, He feels the floor fall out from under him. He would disappear if he held that smile; He would know who they were as he tumbled.
I hear “tumbled” as a version of “plummet,” since they share four letters. And “tumble” is carried over to the start of poem #2, now in the father’s voice:
When my son tumbled from our roof, When he lay soundless, not moving, I stared from the half-painted porch Of apprehension until he Pedaled a leg to release me.
(I’m intrigued by “the half-painted porch / Of apprehension”: the father’s apprehension attributed to the porch.)
Poem #3 is the first of four poems in “Plummeting” which each consist of four italicized lines:
Above thirty feet, chances are You will die when you hit the ground. As soon as you reach the third floor, You’re at luck’s mercy if you fall.
It also contains the first of many “falls” in the sequence.
Poem #4’s speaker is a child, a Boy Scout, whose father leads them on a hike:
My father led us Scouts Along a trail that peaked At the narrow crest Of worthlessness that Pitched down into darkness, And I knelt to grip The ground with my hands, Certain I could fall.
I note the “fall,” of course. But I’m struck by that “narrow crest / Of worthlessness.”
Like “the half-painted porch / Of apprehension” in Poem #2, it links a concrete image with an abstract possessive noun—something we can’t picture but can feel.
Poem #5 begins:
This week I’ve read that Methuselina, The world’s oldest ewe, has died in a fall From a cliff, but fewer American Children are injuring themselves on stairs.
Continuing in the voice of a grandfather, the poem evokes “ladders” and “stairs” (these falling dangers), ending:
The highest Of three flights in our house has open stairs. The youngest grandchild lies on the top step, Spins, and dangles her thin legs, absorbing Our terror until she screams and clutches.
She doesn’t fall, but she pretends she will, teasing the adults into terror.
Poem #6 is another italicized quatrain:
With an open parachute, you land At about fourteen miles per hour. The longest fall survived with no Parachute? 22,000 feet.
In poem #7, we get more statistics about falls:
Remember physics? The formula for falling— Thirty-two feet per second per second? Acceleration. The speed with which strangers on The news hit the ground from ninety stories. No need to calculate. Let’s just say there’s a height After which results are always the same, Advice I heard from a foreman when I panicked Leaning out to wash a fourth-floor window.
So the speaker doesn’t fall; but the possibility panics him. (And I feel giddy just imagining that last line.)
Poem #8 transports us to a new scene: a railroad bridge that a foreman is crawling on— “Along its ninety-foot drop to water.”
I felt, He said, I’d lost the brakes of common sense, That I’d roll forward like a train, my hands And knees crawling the unthinkable air. And because backwards was impossible, I pressed myself so tightly to those tracks I thought I would tattoo my chest with them When my legs, while turning, were over air. The tension that Fincke images here becomes comic—a tone which the next poem picks up:
There was a man, once, who fell Thousands of feet into a small pond And survived like a cartoon person, Like something drawn back to life.
Next, poem #10 leaves any comedy behind, taking us to the World Trade Center disaster on 9/11:
On television, the bodies Of men and women plummeted From a thousand feet, maybe more.
For a moment, they were human, Dressed for white-collar work, and then They became thin missiles, and then Nothing at all.
It’s grim: plummeting humans becoming missiles becoming…nothing.
Fincke has done some research to write poem #11:
A woman survived 14,000 feet Of falling when she landed on a mound Of fire ants, her heart shocked to beating By hundreds of furious stings.
Then poem #12 has us teetering on the edge of a balcony. At the speaker’s daughter’s wedding
the January rental on the twelfth floor, only the penthouse overhead as my wife leaned against the balcony railing to photograph the rare red moon while, behind glass, I swayed, dizzy with imagined falling.
Which leads speaker to speculate:
Who’s to say when balance may be lost, and how far the fall? What doesn’t remind us of the serial darkness that demands us? A woman, days later, delayed our flight back to winter because she was alarmed by items on the wing.
And so we reach the final poem of “Plummeting,” which begins:
Sometimes, the odds are determined by the size Of the well-protected space at the base Of the skull where bone ends at the inward Curve for lessened chance, and yet this student, A young woman who wrote free-verse poems, One of which she’d published the week before, Struck, in falling, that spot so perfectly Upon the stone edge of a step she died. For hours, I recreated that tumble.
—as Fincke has been recreating tumbles throughout this sequence of poems. There are in fact a total of three “tumble”s as well as ten “fall”s, a “drop,” and a “plummeted.” It’s a dizzying sequence of poems, as of course it’s meant to be. At once both terrifying and delightfully captivating.
Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.
