Breath
What is death,
but a letting go
of breath?
One of the last
things he did
was to blow up
the children’s balloons
for the birthday party,
joking and mock-cursing
as he struggled
to tie all
those futtery teats.
Then he flicked them
into the air
for the children
to fight over.
Some of them
survived the party,
and were still there,
after the funeral,
in every room of the house,
bobbing around
mockingly
in the least draft.
She thought about
murdering them
with her sharpest knife,
each loud pop
an angry bullet
from her heart.
Instead, in the quietness
that followed her
children’s sleep,
she patiently gathered
them all up,
slowly undoing
each raggedy nipple,
and, one by one, she took his
last breaths into her mouth.
What is life
but a drawing in
of breath?
This week’s poem is by Adrian Rice, a poet originally from County Antrim, now living in North Carolina. It was first published in Hickory Station, and can now be read in his most recent collection, The Strange Estate: New and Selected Poems, 1986-2017 (Press 53).
Although not a rhyming poem, Breath presents us with a deliberately bold choice of rhyme in its opening tercet: “What is death, / but a letting go / of breath?” The choice is bold for a contemporary writer, because “death” and “breath” have such a long history of cohabitation in Anglophone verse. Partly because the stanza encapsulates a question – rhetorical but not uninteresting – the familiar rhyme and its antithesis seem to make a fresh start.
Not present in the poem, but perhaps subtly evoked by its narrative, is a related, traditional poetic pairing: “womb” and “tomb”. The poem summons images of new life (children, birthdays, the balloons themselves with their “futtery teats”) and makes us aware of the contrast of active, nurturing life and final, entombed breaths.
Other rifts occur as the poem traces the characters’ moods: particularly noticeable are the tonal movements between light playfulness and anger. The father has “struggled” with the balloons, “joking and mock-cursing” before he “flicked them / into the air / for the children // to fight over.” After his death and funeral, the mockery that the mother senses from the balloons “bobbing around … in the least draft” rouses her anger, to the point of considering “murdering” them with “her sharpest knife”. Imagined as gunfire, the sound of the exploding balloons adds unnervingly to the arsenal.
There is a radical change of mood in stanza 11. The children’s quiet sleep has subsumed the mother’s anger and allowed it to pass. Her patient undoing of the balloons reverses the father’s struggles to control them earlier, but both the activities might be seen as final acts of love. There is a delicate but unmistakeable eroticism in this tercet, as, “… one by one, she took his/ last breaths into her mouth.”
The narrative simply and affectingly concludes with a return to the opening question, now with the emphasis on “life”. Now “death” is only the barest echo.
