What happens in this week’s poem? Not much. A woman sees a bobber, one of those red and white floats you put on a fishing line, stuck in a bush near a creek. The woman gets her car stuck in a ditch and refuses a stranger’s offer of help, perhaps because she makes some assumptions about who he is (or isn’t). But a good poem resists and is more than any easy summary.

What I appreciate most about this week’s poem by poet and teacher Rachel Contreni Flynn, who lives in Gorham with her family, is its combination of subtlety and music. Flynn’s long lines sparkle and string us along, with surprises at every turn. That bobber, which seems at first to be a bit of discarded junk, is a metaphor. It is split, as we often are, by its colors. It is split from itself, as the speaker in the poem is separated from the man who offers to help her by something, we don’t know what – beliefs, assumptions, politics?

Maybe, the poem suggests, part of what splits us, what keeps us from knowing each other is that we’re also always imagining each other, rather than just looking each other in the eyes.

America, February

By Rachel Contreni Flynn

The world shudders on, wintering in its enormity. A bobber’s stuck

in the brambles creek side, and I’ve mistaken so many things, but here

it is: dangling brightly, splitting in the cold. Last night I refused the help

of a man in coveralls to pull me from a ditch, refused a man I imagined.

The ditch was icy and deep, precipitous, and I was front-down in it

when he pulled up in a muscular pick-up, sturdy chains coiled in the flat bed,

but I wouldn’t take any chances and waved him past, emphatic, as if content

to dangle dialing numbers in my ass-up minivan. So it’s come to this in a world

where we’re in trouble and pain. And imagining. The man drove away,

and I stayed another hour in the ditch. A bobber, dangling. I keep tabs on it

on my morning walks. How it remains, split between the red and white,

a tiny thing faded by winter sun blasting through the blue.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. This column is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2016 Rachel Contreni Flynn. It appeared originally in the Florida Review and appears here by permission of the author.

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