Poetry Friday: “To Begin With”

Wakefield’s poem presents the metaphor of a peach as the speaker’s body: “I’ll let the sun singe the peach, / my flesh, luxurious, ruined.” The image of the body as a soft fruit blurs the boundaries between human and nature, planting identity within context. In this way, “To Begin With” reminds me of Mark Strand’s “Keeping Things Whole” and Denise Levertov’s “Action.” The repetition of the “I” and the sense of absence joins these poems in a frank depth, one that relies on interconnectivity and awareness. Wakefield’s lush details tether our senses to the speaker’s surroundings, tightening the bonds between each element, like the “grass a green halo,” “my mother’s washcloth,” and “the hard pit of my heart.” With acute awareness, the speaker apologizes to the grass, “Excuse me, grass, for keeping / you in the dark while I lie here.” In these lines, the speaker at once acknowledges that the presence of a body, or a peach, requires the absence of something else: light and food for the plant life she obscures. With a delicate balance of language, Wakefield creates a taut web, each strand heavy with meaning and each gap a window for more.