Contributor’s Marginalia: Emma Hine on “Worry” by Alessandra Lynch

Alessandra Lynch’s “Worry” begins in perfect, end-stopped iambic pentameter. That bird I thought an insect was a bird. Though declarative and mostly monosyllabic, this sentence is deceptively complex, an equation bounded by the bird on either side, with the speaker’s mistaken impression suspended in between. From the world’s perspective, the line could just as easily be That bird was a bird, the speaker’s misperception lifted out.

Look at what Lynch accomplishes: worry is embedded in the very first sentence, existing inside but also separate from everyone else’s reality. There is what actually happens, then there is how a mind operates, and somehow these must learn to share the same brief line. This feels intimately, almost uncomfortably, familiar to my experience of living: From its first line, “Worry” reads like my own mind simultaneously engaging in and resisting catastrophic thought. This tension is played out syntactically as the poem, seeking control, yearns toward sonnet, its fast-heaving, clacking syllables settling every few lines into iambs only to wrench into cacophony again.

“Worry” operates for me in three primary movements and a final almost-couplet, like an overlong Shakespearean sonnet. In the first movement, the speaker observes the bird and, in describing it, betrays her own preoccupations—to her, the bird must be manic in the branches, must be driven by the recklessness that comes from dread. That poor bird, we think. But also: poor speaker, poor us. For what is a poem but a worry of human hair, unstrung petals, who-knows-what? And what is anyone but a creature with a throat insistent / with insects and forest and wind?

Set off from the first with an indent, the poem’s second section—like its opening line—moves beyond the bird into pure thought. For the speaker, as for me, thought equals worry equals big unanswerable questions: How do any of us survive…? How do we shuttle through…and not collapse? It is a brave and tricky thing to so explicitly address the human condition, and I personally tend to prefer poems that engage questions like these more peripherally. Lynch’s existential swoop here succeeds, though, because she so inventively frames it within the speaker’s perception of the bird. Part two is also her poem at its most cacophonous and most desperate, with wildly oscillating syntax, startling images, and both internal and end rhymes (unseen and smithereens, lives and eyes, tracks and collapse). And the worry she both describes and enacts here is one we all share: How do we live, how do we love, how do we write with future griefs clattering away at the window.

The third movement begins with a delightful turn: Together we watched the bird in the quivering heat by our house. This sudden intrusion of the plural raises the stakes—the speaker now has someone to grieve, something to lose. The other person carried by that we is too important to require a formal introduction, and yet we can’t help but notice that they stand outside of this intense interiority. The poem did not begin That bird we thought an insect was a bird. Despite the companionship, despite the shared house, the catalogue of worries is internal, individual, belonging to a mind alone. This, to me, is the poem’s heart: it is about the loneliness of standing close to someone you love, looking at something together, and being unable to share the circularity and isolation of your particular thoughts.

The answer, offered by Lynch in an iambic slant-couplet, is twofold: we each carry all that noise, individually, and with difficulty—and while we do this we must also hold each other hard.