De Profundis
Nothing (when I needed anything)
could be seen,
not even death’s shadow.
Nothing (when suicide seemed helpful)
could be grasped,
not even the darkness thick as drowning.
My blind eyes, wild,
blinked. Waited.
Nothing.
Then in the blackness,
a sleek shimmer of blue,
like a martin’s feathered neck turning in sunlight,
unfurled.
_______________
Charles Lewis
Review by Debra Kaufman
This poem describes its title beautifully and completely in thirteen lines. The repetition of “Nothing” is like a knell, while the other lines carry a kind of desperate yearning for a glimmer of hope. This reader breathed a deep sigh when the “sleek shimmer of blue” appears out of the darkness (in the perfect simile of “a martin’s feathered neck turning in sunlight,/unfurled”) and was grateful for this lyric, each word exactly as it should be.
Review by Jared Pearce
The poem turns—the speaker’s situation turns—on that martin’s neck, the most poignant and concrete image in the poem, and by doing so, the poem opens a psychological truth that might be worth hearing: when we can’t find the real, the concrete, something specific to love or to kill, we begin to meander and lose. The bird’s sheen is exactly what it needs to be to save the speaker and to save us all.