Excerpt from “You Can Tell”
from Angie Estes, Tryst
YOU CAN TELL
if fish are fresh by the way
their bodies arch, tails flipped up
like waves nearing shore or hands about to
wave, crests about to break, the shape
of a hand beneath a woman’s back
unhooking her brassiere, writhing
or writing the way Milton’s serpent
first approached Eve— . . .
How unfair t
o stop the cascade and rush of Estes’s poem. The images slip one into the other, from the visceral and earthbound fish, to the erotic sensuality of the body, to the spiritual reach of Milton’s epic poetry of evil and temptation. We can see no distinction, the poem suggests, among material nature, tidal energy, the sensuality and the vulnerabilities of a woman’s body, or imagination and spirituality. And yet the waves do not ebb, the hand does not wave, the brassiere does not fall, and Eve does not yet face temptation or exile. The images rush forward even while they also wait in suspension. But again that fish, the fish out of water, will die, though the poem does not allow its death in the poem. Instead the lines hurry away from the fish and its consumption, pushing instead into further waves of imagery and figuration. Maybe this is the work of images, to push us onward and to promise more. Merciful because of what they help us to deny, and because they confirm the binding connection of the natural, the sensual, and the imaginary.
“You Can Tell,” from Angie Estes, Tryst. Oberlin College Press, the FIELD Poetry Series, 2009.