That

It would be better not to be
that fly — the fly that sees
in stereo
what happens
that day

and, for that matter, all the days
before and after that.
The problem for
the fly is
that that

wall is too close to other walls,
producing that effect
of entrapment
one feels in
a box

that’s been shut without a plan for
who will open it and
when. Is that my
head? wonders
the fly,

hearing thoughts tick like an heirloom
in a room where the big
light’s been left on
by mistake —
like that,

like that, like that, like that, like that,
like that, like that, like that,
like that, like that,
like that, like
that, like

Syllabic writing can interestingly disrupt a poem’s surface, producing line-breaks and syntactical jolts that can’t be anticipated. But those effects need to work with the poem, enhance or purposely not enhance the thought, so that both the disruptions and the chance moments of metrical regularity integrate with the whole vision. This kind of holistic syllabic writing is cleverly achieved in the poem of this week, That, from Rebecca Watts’s latest collection The Face in the Well.

It’s a poem to listen to before you start working out the pattern. What you first hear is the repetition of the word “that” in various grammatical forms. It occurs three times in the first stanza and four times in the second. At this stage, it might merely suggest a little deft wordplay to be filed under “light verse”. But this would altogether miss the poet’s intentions. As the repetition mounts, “that” becomes an essential and unnerving auditory effect. The “tick” of the consonants as the word plays its various roles – determiner, conjunction, relative pronoun, intensifier – resembles the small, distinct, unnervingly irregular sound of a fly hitting a window or wall in trying to escape from a room.

The statement of the fly’s predicament is no joke: “It would be better not to be/ that fly — the fly that sees/ in stereo/ what happens/ that day// and, for that matter, all the days/ before and after that.” Watts’s reference to the “stereophonic” compound vision of the house-fly, captured in this photograph, points out, casually, importantly, a remarkable adaptation of the species, but one that can’t help this particular fly’s survival. It’s trapped in an enclosed space, and in time, where “that day” is part of an unending chain of days.

This fly is not a fly-on-the-wall, but nonetheless a fly with a well-realised consciousness. It’s aware, with an awareness perhaps only slightly different from the speaker’s, of the fact “that that// wall is too close to other walls…” The sentence beginning with “the problem for the fly” jolts against the syllabic walls of the stanzas across which it moves. Space seems to shrink, and the fly in a room becomes a fly in a box. When the sentence ends, the fly thinks ‘Is that my/ head?’ – and what might have been a moment of comedy is overturned by the sense of panicked disorientation. There’s no help from the demonstrative “that” when “that is” turns into “is that…?”

The fly, while beating out its brains, hears “thoughts tick like an heirloom/ in a room where the big/ light’s been left on/ by mistake — like that…” and this enlargement, the box now again a room, is frighteningly imagined. The heirloom is insistently present. It may be a clock, but it ticks like a time-bomb. The “big light” blazes relentlessly. No living creature is present except the fly.

Is the fly a person? It represents, I think, a mind which is trapped, which knows only the burden of family, inheritance and time (symbolised by that heirloom), and walls of various kinds. Through the fly, the poem enacts a life-or-death need to escape. This is almost the antithesis of the title-poem, where the face the speaker sees and recognises as their own at the bottom of the well offers liberation and rightness of location: “Loneliness and fear and all the shame/ that dutifully feeds them flowed away.// I didn’t have to hear my voice thrown back/ to understand the face was always there,// at home deep down, connected to the source,/ needing a reflection to make it live.”

There is no self-saving reflection in That: only the hard density of the sides of the box or the walls of a locked room, only a head full of brilliant eyes accosted by inexorable “that-ness”. The poem stands by itself, but readers may find the philosophical concept of Haecceity (‘This-ness’) a useful connection.

Finally, the phrase “like that” shuts down every other verbal escape route. And, as resources shrink to their essence, the 8,6,4,3,2 syllabic stanza pattern describes the shrinkage with the utmost intensity. The even numbers of syllables in the first three lines make a little breathing-pace because they call up metrical structures (iambic tetrameter, trimeter and dimeter) but of course this breaks down with the three-syllable fourth line. Now the rhythm of repeated action has disintegrated, and the fly seems to have lost its last shred of comprehension “like that, like/ that, like”.

Rebecca Watts has written an unusual and compelling poem. Ruthlessly focused, unfalteringly mimetic, it reveals her technical accomplishment at its boldest and best.