rubble from that very breakthrough, which threatens to bury and immobilize its
advance [Ö]^40In ëFacts About Waterí the space conjured by the woman for the man
is comparable with the enclosed yet open space of poetic language, as
it negotiates with the foundational and anti-foundational, the facts and
the water, identity and alterity, and fixity and unfixity.
In the poem free space is defined by unfree space, and the manís
field can only be virgin territory if four walls are built around it to
hold the man in and hold him together. This is a poignant metaphor
for the problematic notion of free territory. In order to steady the man
his space must be positioned outside of the social, segregated or
walled off from the rest of the world, remaining unpopulated except
for himself. In this imagined space of security which is like a prison,
boundaries must be built against alterity in order for the man to be
held together, so as to ësteadyí him and stop his shaking, and to create
a home or port for an unhomely subject who is anchorless. The green
field constitutes a solitary withdrawal within an enclosed space which
is comparable with the end of ëHeartbreak Hourí (p.81) when the
speaker leaves her lover and faces ëthe solid grey door/ and my own
walls, my silencesí. Singularity is associated with silence, whereas
togetherness is imagined in terms of the possibility of openings or
communication. The manís enclosure is also presented in terms of a
different interiority as it connects with the erotic connotations of the
woman holding the man in or taking the ëotherí into herself. The
female figure offers the man a secure womb like space and he is like a
child who, if he needs her in the night, can call out. However, attempts
to delimit the subjectís space so as to find an anchor to stop his
unheimlich shaking, take him closer to the fluidity or alterity that
threatens him; that is, rather than finding a foundation against the
flood which seems to haunt both of the figures in the poem.
In return for the field he gives the woman words and brings her
to his shore, a boundary space or a transient and ever shifting territory
between land and sea. Biblical imagery from the first stanza is
continued when like Christ, he writes in the sand. The writing in the
sand is dissolved by water, suggesting the dissolution of language and,
40 Ibid., p.154.