Monday’s Poem: ‘Town of Unspeakable Things,’ by Allison Seay

Then there was the time I looked directly into the face
of the life I thought I was missing,

of love.  I used to think to be not alone meant
never having to walk through the high wheat

or struggle in the water.  Not having to decide not
to fling from some height.

Once, the two of us rode one bicycle.
I wore a straw hat and perched on the handlebars

and beside us the sea oats swayed like skirts
and I heard a trilling in the crabgrass.

The sidewalks were bleached as grecian stone
as we rode past the fish shop smelling of morning—
salt, bread, limes, men.

Riding in front, it was such that
I could not be heard always, at least not the first time

for you pedaled into the wind
and my hair was a ribbon in your eyes.

I said I thought bougainvillea was a stoic plant
and then had to say twice, no, stoic! and then
no, the bougainvillea! and then you said easily

it was nothing like that at all.

But our future was clear enough when I asked if you saw
the clean aprons of those men

(how much longer you think until they clean the fish?
did you see how white those aprons were? did you see?)

To which you said
How much is it, then, you think you need?

© by Allison Seay.  Printed by permission of the author.

Allison Seay teaches English and writing at Lynchburg College. She earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and later served as associate editor of The Greensboro Review and assistant director of the MFA Writing Program at UNCG. Her poems appear in such literary journals as Pleiades, Southern Review, and Crazyhorse among others.

Arts & Academe‘s poetry editor, Lisa Russ Spaar, notes:  What is a face?  What does it mean to look “into the face” of someone, something? To face up.  To kiss a face. To save face. We “face” people and situations in order to confront, to salvage reputation, to admit, to concede.  And though certain of the faithful may “seek his face continually” (Chronicles 16:11), God tells Moses in Exodus that “man shall not see me and live.”

Clearly, faces are powerful entities.  In certain cultures, contexts, ceremonies, plays, private games, crimes, and periods of mourning or carnival, the face is veiled. Experts tell us that humans, even as infants, are especially wired to “see” other human faces, which we tend to take in as a gestalt rather than by individual parts. And judging from its use on drivers licenses, passports, lanyard cards, Facebook profiles, and other material and virtual documents, the face is still regarded as the feature that best identifies a person.  Ubiquitous emoticons aside, faces are also essential to the expression and registering of human feelings.   Deriving from the Latin facies (“appearance, form, figure), related to the Latin facere (“to make”),  a “face”can refer physically to the sense organ complex on the front of the head (comprised of eyes, nose, mouth, chin) or figuratively to anything which is the world-directed part or aspect of a place or circumstance, such as the face of someone’s love affair, which is the subject, in part, of Allison Seay’s “Town of Unspeakable Things.”

As though in the midst of an ongoing narrative, and with the almost offhand flippancy of an aside, Seay tells her reader in the very opening clause that “Then there was the time I looked directly into the face / of the life I thought I was missing, / of love.”  The reader has the sense that the speaker has, before the poem commences, been in the midst of relating some sort of meditation on the nature of life and love and has now turned her attention to one defining moment in particular.  But we know from the title that something about her narration is “unspeakable,” and she suggests, in fact, that the very face she is about to “look directly into” is in itself a fiction—it’s not the life she is in, but a life she thinks , or once thought, she might be missing, a life she equates with love. So already the reader is at several veiled removes even as the speaker intimates that she’s on the cusp of making a revelation.

Despite her use of temporal tags (“I used to” and “once”), however, Seay’s narrative is not linear. Just when we think we’re going to hear about that important time of facing up, of seeing into the truth of things, we’re taken on a tangent into the speaker’s notion of what she “used to think to be not alone meant”—again, the mesh of conditional tenses, infinitives, and negatives clouds the picture—life and love have been elusive and ambiguously bound up for the speaker with fantasies about fugue state bouts of perilous loneliness, including “[n]ot having to decide not / to fling from some height.”

“Once,” the speaker continues, shifting gears yet again, “the two of us rode one bicycle.”  We are several stanzas into this tale within a tale before we realize that this bike ride along the seashore now being recounted is, in fact, “the time” referred to in line one.  Things seem idyllic, even romantic, at first—our speaker in straw hat,

perched on the handlebars

and beside us the sea oats swayed like skirts
and I heard a trilling in the crabgrass.

The sidewalks were bleached as grecian stone
as we rode past the fishshop smelling of morning –
salt, bread, limes, men.

Yet something is not right.  The narrator, “riding in front,” cannot see her lover, who is behind her on the bike, pedaling “into the wind.” And so when the speaker tries to point out things as she passes, her words are swallowed by gusts and misheard, if heard at all, by the pedaller of the bicycle. What might, under other circumstances, be a humorous, Malapropistic vignette, however, takes a dark turn when we realize that the lover’s inability to hear the speaker has less to do with the fact that she and he are not facing one another (although this is metaphorical) and that the buffeting sea breezes are garbling the sounds she makes, and more to do, finally, with his seeming indifference, self-absorption, and even dismissive detachment (“and then you said easily // it was nothing like that at all”). By the time we reach the epiphanic moment—the truth the speaker faces down—the economy of the poem has turned from matters of time to issues of quantity—to of what, finally, accounts for “enough”—in the relationship, in terms of what lies ahead for the narrator as she stares out ahead into a future that does not hold the full commitment of the lover at her back, who has betrayed a willingness to give only so much, and no more:

But our future was clear enough when I asked if you saw
the clean aprons of those men

(how much longer you think until they clean the fish?
did you see how white those aprons were?  did you see?)

To which you said
How much is it, then, you think you need?

Those clean fishermen’s aprons, destined for staining—hard not to see them as the white page of the poem, the speaker’s full-frontal and difficult adjustment of the fit between her own expectations and her realization that the fulfillment she thought she was missing might not after all be any more than a solitary, one-sided, one-way experience .  What C.D. Wright says in a lovely pamphlet about Jean Valentine, writing a word / changing it, published by Brian Teare’s Albion Books (2011), might also apply to Seay’s poem:  “In words, narrative is ultimately inescapable, but scattered elements of it will get the job done. Rather than narrate, she is organizing her emotions.” To face the truth about her truth, the narrator of Seay’s poem borrows the temporal semblance of a coherent story, the account of a love affair, but with the claustral acoustics of the lyric.

Looking into the “face” of this poem reminds me of the experience of seeing Richard Avedon’s In the American West exhibit at the Amon Carter Museum on Fort Worth, Texas, in 1985. For his oversized black-and-white portraits, Avedon chose to photograph his complex, often life-ravaged subjects in front of white sheets rather than before their actual contexts—rodeos, midways, carnivals, small towns. The subjects gaze one way, out of their frames, and the effect of removing the particulars of time and space in the backdrop is that the faces, finally, do the work of narrative, of fiction, making unspeakable but powerful testament.  Interestingly, we never really look into any faces in Seay’s poem. But the poem brings the speaker and her readers face-to-face with an almost untranslatable negative epiphany. Seay creates a suggestive, temporal narrative of unrequited love by confronting its ineffable paradoxes, its “lyric” entrapments.

(Photo by Dar’ya Sipyeykina)