Phantasmagoric Bed Time Story: Otherworldly Shifts Bring Us Back Home
In Elizabeth Cantwell’s debut poetry collection, Nights I Let the Tiger Get You (Black Lawrence Press, 2014), we traverse dangers across a tangible universe and seek respite in dream-like interludes; both planes of existence feel familiar. A child pets a fawn. Then a body is pulled out of a bottle drifting in the ocean. Cantwell cannot possibly warn us about all the dangers this universe contains and yet she is continually attempting to warn us. As William Blake wrote his eighteenth century poem, “The Tyger,”
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
so Cantwell attempts to draw her readers through dichotomous worlds. Blake questions, how can the same being that made the lamb create the tiger? Cantwell answers, using a nuanced palette of language. On one side is daily life: Cantwell illustrates a cat “licking a knuckle,” or a tourist eating Hamburger Helper in France. Amidst these reasonable images, the reader experiences ghosts breathing over our shoulders or someone is launched into outer space, wrapped in a picnic blanket. Cantwell reads us a gentle bed time story while simultaneously opening the closet door to let the monsters in. In the poem “Nights I Let the Tiger Get You (I),” we are thrust into the real – nothing puts reality more in perspective than fleeing from danger. Rooted in the physical, Cantwell at first bemoans her earthly body:
My legs, my legs, two lumbering
jackasses that just can’t get
the job done.
When looking straight ahead,
carrying a person feels almost the same
as dragging a body along
behind you…
The sound of the tiger
no longer behind us but
on top.
There is repeated imagery throughout the book of dragging a body behind oneself (conveying the book’s disparate themes of humanness, evolution, metamorphosis, and outer space) and the thought of trying to save or warn a loved one weighs on the speaker’s shoulders. Cantwell fleshes out various fears from various life scenarios, in a spectrum of different environments. Cantwell’s inner conscious entreats these dangers on metaphysical planes. Not only in describing war on television, but also under the “Happy Birthday” sign hung at home. There is the dark ocean, fiery car accidents, a bomb under a bus, a body or animal coming apart. She sees life balancing on the head of a pin and isn’t afraid to draw our eyes to it. In “A Hot, Close Sun Turning Your Temples Into Ash,” she writes:
The things you never
thought you’d want to save you end
up trying to pry out of his jaws. And when you think you’ve
won, it all starts up again, the sky, burning and
heavy; the sound of the machines; this
day, and the next, and
the half planet still in the dark.
Cantwell pushes the believability of the realistic right up against the surreal; the two interconnect perfectly, like a twisted game of Jenga. Cantwell creates a domestic apocalypse in “Learning Curve,” and it is written in the casual style of surveying vacation photos. She maneuvers the boundaries of the unreal and real, using suburban imagery and domestic symbols that overlap with say, the physically unsettling image of skin peeling off. She presents the idea of a local theater performance of “A Midsummer Nights’ Dream,” co-mingling with words like “gas mask,” and “opera gloves.” All of these phrases and words live in a vein of normalcy, so to speak, but this is what she formulates:
. . . the Atlantic Ocean has been burning
for four days We were told to stay inside
but we’d forgotten which houses
belonged to us Now we lie on the beach
watching the local theater company’s
production of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream In the audience one lumbering
ash man walks up to an ash
woman and leans over He looks
surprised at all the ash Like a man who
hits his deer with his car and stops
to see his full name written on its back
in Sharpie . . .
The overall effect of coupling these phrases together makes us recognize our own feelings of displacement. The characters in the poem (Cantwell depicts many characters) are told to stay inside because the ocean is burning, but they forget where their home is. In Cantwell’s universe, the obvious result is then to be marooned on a beach, watching Shakespeare. People around them have turned to ash but are still walking about and talking to each other.
The danger is expertly crafted in all of the Tiger poems (there are five of them throughout the collection, holding it together like a spine,) The reader continuously undertakes the tigers at the picnic scene. Sometimes the tiger is behind us, or in front of us, or we cannot see because he is already on top. No matter where he is, he never stops. From “Nights I Let the Tiger Get You (II)”:
future and past
In it I couldn’t tell you
when things start to go wrong. The sidewalk of
the picnic blanket.
The slow zoom on the fur
that grows bigger and bigger
across the screen of my eyelids.
Okay so I am dragging your body
along behind me again. The way the bee
keeps pollen on his legs, we’re together, we’re flying
on to some other field of pistols…
The tiger comes, she drags the body, she lands in a field of guns. Even the bees cough up blood. She cannot escape the attack, the aftermath of always “dragging your body.” And time marches on, the past and the future, one big circle. We are caught in this loop with Cantwell, but unlike her, we don’t want to escape. We want to witness.
As with any trauma or attack, it feels almost logical to leave one’s body entirely. We try hard to stay glued together, mentally and physically, but in Cantwell’s world, a body eventually becomes ether, a thought, a soul — whether on this plane or another. The surreal invades the real. Our basements “hold atlases we’ve never seen before,” and a child ghost sets up a guillotine “by your arm.” The ghosts live amongst us but we are also one with them, as we repeat actions and words and are continually stuck on a haunting of our own making.
The repeated Tiger poems repeat a nightmare, yes, and eventually intermingle with the speaker’s brother in the last Tiger poem (V). The speaker illustrates the brother’s struggle with addiction. It is heartbreaking. The Tiger nightmare is here again, this time, the brother is a focal point. This nightmare is his walking narrative:
Something falls past the window
and you flinch. It could have been a bird.
But it also could have noon not
a bird. It could have been
your parole officer, or me, saying something like:
You can’t come to my wedding
unless you have been sober for six months.
The speaker and the reader are not sure what is outside the window, only that it scares us, even if it is a tiny bird. The bird could be memory or a larger shadow: the future. It is a warning and we will revisit it. Revisiting dangers in new landscapes is cyclical as well. In “A Kingdom Ago by the River,” Cantwell writes:
Eventually everything goes in circles:
the raft, the fat man’s
bowel movements, the hair of the dead
man’s head in the water, the smoke, the eyes of the horses.
The men in the forest will go in circles, too
searching for some silly well they dreamt of long ago
waiting for the bodies, the men they killed
to bloody their doormats…
That is no ship
that is no forest
that is no arrow
Those are not your lungs on the ground being rained on.
That is not your daughter, bleeding into your palm.
Even though we are in the world of make believe and Cantwell is instructing us on what we see and what we do not, we still hold a bleeding girl in our arms. Like some of the violent imagery, Cantwell’s sentences also reveal sudden stops and starts within sentences. These line breaks are enjoyable and such a breath of fresh air. For example, at one point in the long poem “Nights I let the Tigers Get You (V),” she writes:
One more crime, one more
act of subconscious mind on
the wide-flung haunches.
When I say the word “brother”
I mean
Like the jaws of a tiger clamping down on a throat, Cantwell silences the reader on the page. We are left finishing the grisly business in our minds that she began. For some, the most alive some people feel is upon cheating death; in Cantwell’s collection, every page is a rush, a sweet relief, a potential (but not guaranteed) victory.
From “Nights I Let the Tiger Get You (V)”:
But the next time
the curtain rises, the next night,
I’ll know: I just can’t save the child.
And the crowd goes wild.
As the speaker accepts that she cannot save the child in her dream, we must confront the fact that, in the universe Cantwell’s poems construct, we cannot save ourselves. We read on, only praying that the tiger will somehow be kept at bay.
went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and currently lives in the DC area with her family. She is the author of four chapbooks. Recent work can be seen / is forthcoming at Toad Suck Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, Yes, Poetry, Gargoyle Magazine, Jet Fuel Review, Glittermob, The Norfolk Review, Moss Trill, Pith, So to Speak, Freezeray, Crab Fat Literary Review, and Hobart.
