wearing the weeds of birth. (p.75)Water is also connected with feminine tides as the poem moves into
womb imagery where the word ëborneí can be phonetically linked
with the birth imagery in the first stanza. What is interesting is how
the word ëborneí can mean to be carried away or transported yet also
to be limited. For example, the noun ëborneí comes from the French
meaning marker or boundary, and the verb ëbornerí meaning to limit
or restrict. The poem imagines the speaker being ëborneí ëas you were/
once dragged from the waterís wombí. The womb is an enclosed
space from which the baby emerges and in this case, s/he emerges
ëwreathedí and ëwearing the weeds of birthí. Weeds cling to the earth,
a wreath is usually associated with death rather than birth, and the
child is ëdraggedí with some difficulty from the womb. Such a choice
of imagery does not suggest an easy or ethereal transportation in the
way that the title of the poem seems to promise. To be ëborneí is to be
carried away yet also restricted. To refer back to Deleuze and
Guattariís philosophical vocabulary: the subject of consciousness is
limited by molar lines or foundational thought but there are also lines
of flight; one is born/borne both bounded and carried away.
As she claims to open the ëflood-gatesí or the ësea-salt of my
thoughtsí, the imagery echoes that of ëPolesí which imagines rivers of
the mind. In the poem, body and mind run together as with the image
of embarrassment or ëshy red stealing to my skiní. The person is
presented in terms of osmosis whereby the limits, ëbornesí or
floodgates of the body and mind, are opening and absorbing. The
other figure in the poem is imagined as ësea-greení and to ëlet the
ocean iní has erotic implications comparable with ëFacts Of Waterí,
where the female figure holds the man in and holds him together. The
poem becomes an articulation of desire for the ëotherí as the speakerís
heart ëis in my mouthí. Yet she is choked by excess of emotion and
her heart clogs her mouth with the effect of threatening the utterance
of the poem. However, as the ending acknowledges: ësilence is by far
the harder cry.í Unable to cry silence, speech enables her to articulate
desire for the ëotherí, and to encounter alterity through language, and
in this way the poem opens the floodgates of speech, thought and her
body. Desire to connect with alterity that is imagined in terms of an
excess of emotion is the drive or current that motivates the poem, and