Contributor’s Marginalia: Traci Brimhall on “The Boatman” by Katie Schmid

The experience of Katie Schmid’s “The Boatman” is the experience of recognizing yourself in someone else’s grief. I love the tension of that opening stanza next to the title, how the expectation of the title so quickly becomes subverted, and then how the mother is both vessel and guide. I both admire the dexterous use of gender and slippery movement of the poem and also feel deeply my identification with its grief, how it echoes dreams of my own dead mother, and I begin to imprint my grief on these stanzas. As Schmid moves on to the next stanza, this otherworldliness takes on the domestic and commercial, this remnant of the living still full of detergent and loneliness. I also love what she does with the line break here, how she recognizes that the line is the private utterance while the sentence is the public utterance, how she enjambs the stanza at “Our bodies have always belonged // to each other.” The poem is rife with these private moments, these distinct and quiet meanings, like “all the kisses // she told me I owed her” and “to the edge // of the water”. My thoughts linger there on belonging and kisses and edges before the revelation of ownership, affection debts, and the water that lies beneath the edge.

The dead are so often guides in literature, but here, I don’t know what will happen, who or what a mother is after she is gone. But I love that the “I” is embarrassed, that emotion so rarely explored in poems and almost never connected with grief. And I love that the “I” is a child again in the presence of the mother, kissed and tickled. In my dreams of my dead mother, something similar happens, though I (as was often true) am her caretaker, tending her, brushing her hair, and once pinching and pinching her until I hurt her enough to make her leave. The ghost dream can make relationships simple, clear, and yet somehow still so distant. But in the grief that isn’t mine, I love how Schmid moves to forgiveness and ecstasy and fear after the embarrassment. Even in that otherworldly state the emotion is palpable, nearly somatic and exclamatory. And in that state of emotion how the two bodies in the poem unite. My mother died shortly after my son was born and again I make this poem a chimera for my life—losing a mother, becoming a mother.

It feels impossible to write about the ending. Which is the way of so many endings, and the way of death itself. The emotions and the privacy of the line do some of their most impressive work here, the break from “Each / each other” shows the distinctness and unity of self and mother, the human becomes both animal and God in death, distinct and both. This rapturous union is also in “we lift our hand”, the plural self, the “I” containing and becoming the other, the mother. And the wound—of course, of course!—the wound that created this duplication is God. Good God, that is brilliant and lovely and so full of becoming. Although I see so much of my own grief when I hold the poem up to me like a mirror, this is where I see the grief I long for. It’s a grief I aspire to, transcendent and complete.