The great American poet William Carlos Williams famously said, “No ideas but in things.” He didn’t mean that poems shouldn’t contain ideas, but that concrete things can stand for ideas and make them solid. Great poems break this advice all the time, but there is something to it. Poems most often pay attention to the physical world, or take an idea or feeling and make it physical.
In this week’s poem, Sarah Kilch Gaffney shows us a thing: a comb jelly. In this case, the speaker’s fascination with comb jellies stands for her youth, her coming-of-age, and the danger that lies near the center of even the most familiar things.
Poem with Comb Jellies
By Sarah Kilch Gaffney
I remember being young,
cupping the translucent
globes in a semi-submersed
palm, held close, caught,
but still elementally afloat.
One summer, a tourist boy
bet me five dollars to swim
out and touch a Lion’s Mane
the size of my circled arms:
he must not have known
how much that cold,
dark water, delicate,
stinging flesh, was home.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2016 Sarah Kilch Gaffney. It appears here by permission of the author.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.
Enter your email and password to access comments.
Hi, to comment on stories you must . This profile is in addition to your subscription and website login.
Already have a commenting profile? .
Invalid username/password.
Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.
Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.
Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.