Tidal Pull

May 19 2015

The tug of family

is like a tidal force.

Blood’s gravity

exerting its pull

over vast distances;

so weak, it acts negligibly

in daily life,

but irresistibly

when immeasurable objects

are sufficiently close.

You bear the resemblances,

bad teeth, wonky nose.

The odd behavioural ticks

only others notice.

The definition of home

is where they have to take you in

where you’re truly known.

Where everything seems smaller

than you recall,

the narrow bed, suburban street

childhood desk

and kitchen sink.

Only the trees have kept up,

towering over the shrunken house.

The place you were desperate to leave,

but now seems warm, protected

sweet.

They still embarrass you;

are never happy, like on TV.

But you are enclosed, here

under their wing.

And when the tide comes in

and raises us all

you are grateful

for this ramshackle boat,

dutifully bailing

and safely afloat.

I never read this article. But I was scanning the first couple of paragraphs to see if I wanted to set it aside, and something stuck with me:

More than most contemporary writers, the Irish novelist Anne Enright finds it hard to escape the tidal pull of the family. In a series of funny, bleak, radically unsentimental novels, she has examined the engrossments of such life and has poured over the social genetics of family inheritance—the unhappiness we bequeath, the pleasure we inherit, the tyranny of biological contingency. (All Her Children, by James Wood; from the May 25 2015 New Yorker.)

The tidal pull of family is a perfect description: invisible, inexorable, and operating at a distance. I realize I recently wrote another "tide" poem: Tide Table. Since I like series (I recall the "colour" series), this may be the beginning of another. One more will make it three, the bare minimum to qualify! Anyway, since I was at a loss for a title, I decided it might as well be an homage to Wood's fine writing, and it became Tidal Pull.

I was actually thinking of extended family: how you occasionally assemble, from the corners of the earth; and how no matter how much you may be tempted, cannot disown each other. But the poem ended up becoming more about the actual family home: the old house, and returning there as an adult. Which I know is a bit tired and a bit clichéd, and has all been said before -- even by me! Which is why, if the poem works, it's the ending that does it; neatly calling back to the tidal motif.

This theme of blood and belonging recurs with me, and is not necessarily positive. Because tribalism is one of the great poisons of human history. Its xenophobic impulse underlies racism, nationalism, and sectarianism; and is as much a basis of war as conquest and greed. On the other hand, family is the basic unit of society. And -- as the poem says -- when worst come to worst, is all you can really count on.

This poem is a little unusual for me, both in its sentimentality, and its small runs of regular rhyme. But despite how perilously close it gets to Hallmark and doggerel, it came easily, and was fun to write; which is good enough for me.