Contributor’s Marginalia: Dan Rosenberg responding to Jehanne Dubrow’s “Conchology”

Maybe I’m the spineless one for Googling what a spine is instead of just going on my nerve. But suspicion confirmed: It’s a column of bones stacked on top of each other, joined by tissue, disks, nerves, etc. One column made of interconnected parts, strong enough to keep us upright, flexible enough to let us sway, hunch, meander. So, like this poem.

Dubrow begins in empathy: “These too are called spines,” she announces, finding in the sharp protrusions of a conch shell not the alien, not the monstrosity of what she later calls “syringes shaped undersea,” but a kind of cousin. It’s not just that they’re called spines; it’s that their body part matches ours: “These too.”

Though, does it? Conches don’t call them spines; we do. Maybe these creatures are irretrievably different from us, and Dubrow’s language is just doing what language does: trying to render the strange familiar through the beautiful lie of metaphor, a kind of protection from difference. But if that’s what we’re up to here, we’ve ended up united with these little sea critters anyway: The conch’s spines are indeed for protection. “What beautiful forms a body makes / to guard itself,” Dubrow says, and forms calls up of course poetic structure, the way we reshape our language around the unsayable.

The vertebrae of the human spine are divided into five groups: cervical at the top, then thoracic, lumbar, sacral, and coccygeal. In diagrams it looks not unlike a sonnet in the top-heaviness of its sections. Dubrow’s poem is not a sonnet, but it bends somewhere in the thoracic area, turning from aquatic anatomy to human complaint. Unlike the burly conch, our spines are—not weak, but “weakness by comparison.” Our relatively wimpy spines seem like fragility itself! But isn’t their weakness because of their comparative complexity, the fact that we ask so much more of our spines?

And then it gets personal: A plaintive voice appears, betrayed by their own spine, not just bedridden but “left soft and brackish in the sheets.” The metaphor has circled around: they’re not like us anymore; we’re like them. Looking at the conch’s anatomy has reframed the self, just as Rilke staring at a sculpture of Apollo led to a mid-life crisis.

And the ending, again sonnet-like, rejects what it wants to give us: the synthesis of self and stranger, the troubled metaphoric and empathetic connection that drove this voice to see a second self in this strange marine creature. “There was no sound of ocean / held inside me. I was not tinged / with the blushing pink of dawn.” But why end with this rejection of similarity, this articulation of the limits of metaphoric identification? It’s the humility, really, that makes this poem sing. Humility allows us to really see the conch, and to find in it a vastness and beauty that surpasses our own inner landscapes. It takes an honest eye to spot and summon up such beauty. It takes a spine to bow to it.