Adobe, Taos N.M. Series, Pastel, by John Cummings
Main Event
All I remember is a gush of wind and . . . .
–Witness
Like a river grinding down canyon,
like a hard wind up high, like the stars at night.
Like something horrific
and the guy standing next to us
expresses it perfectly.
Suddenly you crushed beneath
wheels, plowed into earth. Earth into earth. The water
falls. It becomes still. The wind stops.
The hard walls.
___________________
Nancy Christopherson
Review by Dave Mehler
What is the ‘Main Event’? What is happening that is being likened to being caught in a flash flood? Is it standing at a bedside while a loved one dies, or a car crash that’s been witnessed (more likely a hit and run of a pedestrian or bicyclist)? Or could it be the end of the world where a crowd has gathered to watch something appear from the sky–a UFO or the second coming of Christ, or a falling asteroid (my cliches)? We have a set up of something almost like a theatre in which there are spectating bystanders and someone being acted upon–this is the frame. All the spectators can do is watch–one comments–they are not capable of stopping or interfering with the action because whatever it is has already been set in motion. We the readers are caught, like the speaker, in medias res. If we were to take this at face value, it would be people on a hike caught in a flash flood hiking through a sheer canyon, but there is the simile and anaphora of ‘like,’ three times, the frame of the theatre and impotent watchers, and the all important ‘you.’ It’s obvious the poet has intimate knowledge of situations involving flash flooding, and the death of loved ones and eyewitnessing the aftermath of car crashes. Because it’s all here, more real than imagined: the wind, a river, the stars, a guy next to you expressing the horror perfectly, wheels and grinding earth–then the stillness and hard, implacable walls. What I especially find successful here is the subtlety that this catastrophe could be any of these specifically, but retains the mystery of not necessarily or narrowly needing to be any one of them–in this way it gets to be all of them. The abbreviated structure of tight, short, falling enjambment lends emotive tension, heightening a mystery so concretely compared it is neither too telling nor vague.