This Bird Has Flown
Rachel Sherwood’s early flight of poesy
Rachel Sherwood? I’d never heard of her. But when I stumbled across a poem of hers — “The World in the Evening” — it instantly grabbed hold of me and demanded a slow re-reading.
Behind the quotidian details of a suburban dusk is a note of eternal sadness in a world gone wrong. As early as the third line, I was all in, and I was curious about the poet before I’d even finished the poem. When did she write this? Where is she from? What other poems, books, essays has she written? There are so many acclaimed poets I’ve yet to encounter. Rachel Sherwood surely was one.
Here’s the poem that lit into me:
The World in the Evening
As this suburban summer wanders toward dark
cats watch from their driveways — they are bored
and await miracles. The houses show, through windows
flashes of knife and fork, the blue light
of televisions, inconsequential fights
between wife and husband in the guest bathroom
voices sound like echoes in these streets
the chattering of awful boys as they plot
behind the juniper and ivy, miniature guerillas
that mimic the ancient news of the world
and shout threats, piped high across mock fences
to girls riding by in the last pieces of light
the color of the sky makes brilliant reflection
in the water and oil along the curb
deepened aqua and the sharp pure rose of the clouds
there is no sun or moon, few stars wheel
above the domestic scene — this half-lit world
still, quiet calming the dogs worried by distant alarms
there — a woman in a window washes a glass
a man across the street laughs through an open door
utterly alien, alone. There is a time, seconds between
the last light and the dark stretch ahead, when color
is lost — the girl on her swing becomes a swift
apparition, black and white flowing suddenly into night
Excellent! I looked her up and quickly learned there wasn’t much more of her to be had. Just a few poems, because she died young. In 1979 at the age of 25.
A better world
She and I were born in the same year — 1954 — and based on the little I know of her, she seems like everyone I hung out with. I like to imagine an alternate universe in which she and I crossed paths as twenty-somethings, were friends, did some fun young things, waited for the decade to pass. And when she showed me her startling first poems, I told her “you’re gonna be famous.” And I believed it.
In this better universe, there’s a good chance the world would have heard of Rachel Sherwood by now. She would be reaching the same age as accomplished contemporary poets like Rita Dove, Sharon Olds, Dorianne Laux, Vijay Sheshadri, Cornelius Eady, Kim Addonizio. She would have been plying her poetry trade for decades, gathering experience, honing her craft. And like her peers, perhaps she’d have achieved significant laurels, maybe a Pulitzer Prize like Dove, Olds, and Sheshadri.
The real world wasn’t very kind to Rachel. She died in a car accident. She was out for the night with two friends, “running around with her rag top down,” as musician Gillian Welch once sang. Her poet friend, David Trinidad, was in the car that night, and he has written a moving tribute about their short time together on earth and the aftermath of the accident. I urge you to read it here.
Will Artificial Intelligence ever be able to extrapolate a complete body of mature work from a dead poet’s earliest poems? John Keats, Paul Laurence Dunbar, the World War I poets who didn’t come home (Rupert Brookes, Wilfrid Owen, Edward Thomas, et al), Arthur Rimbaud (ok, he lived to the ripe old age of 37 but gave up poetry at 21), Sylvia Plath, V. Mayakovsky, Frank O’Hara — they all died young. What else might they have written?
It’s better not to know. The loss is part of the aching beauty of what they left behind.
But in Rachel Sherwood’s case, I wish there was a way to know. She was so young when she died but already writing poetry that was ahead of herself.
The world in the poem
“The World in the Evening” is a compendium of images and sounds in a suburban landscape of sublimated desperation and quiet alarm. It is dusk, and in this half-light the “world” of the poem’s title exists. We are not in a particular place, more like a dreamscape. There is no speaker in the poem, just an omniscient narrator, distant from us. There is no “I” and no “you.” There are people in this suburban scene but they are anonymous and they are gone before the end of the poetic line in which they appear.
The poem occurs in the liminal moments between day and night, when “there is no sun or moon” and just a few early stars wheeling far above. Liminal times and spaces are filled with unease and wonder as one reality loosens its grip and a new reality begins to take hold. Day and night, land and sea, ebb and flow, wake and sleep, male and female, childhood and adulthood. Yin and yang. All contrary but inter-connected.
The threshold joining two contraries is where things get interesting, where duality dissolves and things become blurred, where it is neither day or night (“no sun or moon”), neither summer or autumn, neither light or dark, and change is happening. In the twilight, certainty gives way to uncertainty. And to change.
The commonplace neighborhood goings-on are happening without any connection to the magical or even sacred transitional time from day to night. Dinner (“knife and fork”), the TV, the marital spats, the boys at play in the street, the oil on the street curb — in this stuck suburban world, it feels like nothing will ever change, even as the world wheels from day to day and summer slips into the darker seasons.
Robert Frost wonders in his poem “Acceptance” why “No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud” when a day or a season ends. But in “Acceptance,” the birds know. In Sherwood’s poem, there are no birds, only people, and the people are oblivious as they occupy themselves in their ordinary, numbing ways.
But something mysterious does happen in this poem, something in the dusky liminal space that is magical or mythic. Something transforms dramatically at the end.
Zooming in
Let’s go stanza by stanza. There are 4 of them, each with five lines (and each line, by the way, roughly in pentameter, that is, five accentuated beats). It helps me explain more closely why I am so awed by this poem.
Stanza 1. First lines often tell so much. “As this suburban summer wanders toward dark” — this opening line establishes where (suburbs), when (late summer), and tone (wandering, darkness). It is not a summer’s day but the summer season itself that “wanders toward dark” — a phrase that makes me wary. A darkness larger than evening is coming. Not a good time for wandering.
The next image sets me on edge: those “cats who watch from their driveways” may be feline, or they may be cool dudes leaning on their cars. Are these cats surreal or menacing? “They are bored and await miracles.” With these perfectly chosen words, Sherwood has nailed these suburban cats in this unidentified place: they are numb and hopeless, waiting futilely for a miracle, waiting for their lives to begin.
Add to the heated summer mix a hint of domestic violence below the suburban surfaces. Through the window one sees “flashes of knife,” an image mitigated quickly by the fork. Similarly, the “blue light” of what could be a police car turns out to be the television. And then there is spousal fighting, but it is of no consequence. Is anything of consequence in this evening world?
The “guest bathroom” is a small but wonderful touch. If nothing else, it reminds us we are in suburbia where houses have guest rooms with guest bathrooms. But it ends the stanza on an unsettled note: when do wives and husbands fight in the guest bathroom? It’s unexplained and a little weird.
Stanza 2. Here we meet the “awful boys” with the chattering and plotting of their street games, hiding and piping out their threats to the girls riding by. Boys will be boys. Except here, in the growing darkness, the innocence of boyhood morphs into “miniature guerillas that mimic the ancient news of the world.” What a pithy and devastating phrase that is, turning silly boys in the street into a larger truth about humanity’s failings. W. H. Auden couldn’t improve it.
There’s a final poetic turn of phrase to end the stanza: the girls go riding by “in the last pieces of light.” Yes, the sun is setting brilliantly, but in this neighborhood of suburban oblivion and futility, even the beautiful light is broken into pieces.
Stanza 3. Now the poem’s perspective zooms away from street level to float out “above the domestic scene” where the colorful sky is putting on a final performance before night, mimicked below “in the water and oil along the curb.” It stills the half-lit world, calming the dogs barking at distant alarms. There is beauty in this world, if we paid attention.
Stanza 4. The poem ends with two more domestic details. One can see a woman through a window washing a glass (perhaps trying to see more clearly), and a man through an open door laughing. What is he laughing at? Maybe the TV from earlier? He laughs — “utterly alien, alone” — how sad! — just as the darkness arrives.
Now we come to the poem’s final liminal revelation. There are only “seconds between/ the last light and the dark stretch ahead” — and it is now, in these last seconds of failing light as color drains from the world, that a miracle occurs: the girl on her swing becomes a swift/ apparition, black and white flowing suddenly into night
The metamorphosis
What has happened? What has the girl become? First, let’s stop and relish the beauty and mystery of the image. A young girl, swinging on a swing, higher and higher, suddenly “becomes” something else and flows into the night. Just flies off her swing into the dark, away from the half-lit suburban boredom, the banality and underlying menace of that place. This is the transformative power of liminality.
First thought: a girl vanishing into the night sounds scary. But this is not a “child goes missing in the dark” movie. The girl doesn’t simply vanish. She becomes “a swift apparition.”
This is a wonderful phrase with a dual meaning. A swift is a blackish bird with a white breast and throat, known to be among the fastest birds in flight. The line break emphasizes the girl’s transformation into a bird: “the girl becomes a swift” is how the line ends, and then “apparition, black and white.” The yin and yang of a black and white bird mirrors the girl’s own liminal state.
But “swift” is also an adjective describing the “apparition” the girl has become. And an apparition is exactly what she will be to those she is leaving behind. Alone on a swing at nightfall, the girl becomes a “swift/ apparition,” slipping off her bonds, ghosting the bored cats back in the driveway, and flying away. Swiftly.
I think of Emily Dickinson laughing at society for trying to put a bird in a pound:
They shut me up in Prose —
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet —
Because they liked me “still” —
Still! Could themself have peeped —
And seen my Brain — go round —
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason — in the Pound —
Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
Look down upon Captivity —
And laugh — No more have I —
The girl on the swing willfully flies off as a black and white bird and can now “easy as a Star/ Look down upon Captivity/ And laugh.” Is that the poet herself on the swing, describing her own flight from boredom to bohemia, her own transformation into a self-realized adult who is no longer waiting around for a miracle?
I don’t know, and who cares. Sherwood has created a poem that transcends the personal and achieves the universal. It is a well-crafted verse in which every word seems perfect and necessary, in which every image furnishes its parts to the whole. The poem waits until its final lines to tell of a girl in the twilight at the end of summer — perhaps on the liminal cusp between childhood and womanhood — who flies away like a bird, come what may, away from the “domestic scene” and toward the promise of a different life, a more free-spirited life, the life of a poet.
What a poem! What a poetic mind! What a tragedy.
Obviously I never knew Rachel Sherwood. But from this poem and the handful of others, I feel the loss all those years ago. Her bird flew for too short a time. To her real world pal David Trinidad, I can only say I’m sorry for your loss, which is all of ours, and thanks for keeping Rachel’s lights on.
