Operation
The town froze, close as a fist.
Winter was setting about us.
Like birds the bare trees shivered,
Birds without leaves or nests
As the fog took over.
My words were all gone, my tongue sour.
We sat in the car like the dead
Awaiting the dead. Your hair
Wept round your face like a willow
Unstirring. Your eyes were dry.
Unbodied, like smoke in the crowd,
You vanished. Later came violence.
Not that you felt it or cared,
Swaddled in drugs, apart
In some fractured, offensive dream,
While a bog-Irish nurse mopped up.
“Leave me. I’m bleeding. I bleed
Still. But he didn’t hurt me.”
Pale as the dead. As the dead
Fragile. Vague as the city
Now the fog chokes down again.
A life was pitched out like garbage.
“I bleed still. A boy, they said.”
My blood stings like a river
Lurching over the falls.
My hands are bloody. My mind
Is rinsed with it. Blood fails me.
You lie like the dead, still bleeding,
While his fingers, unformed, unerring,
Hold us and pick us to pieces.
-A. Alvarez
When I first read the first couple stanzas of this poem I immediately pictured a movie scene depicting a couple sitting in a car breaking up or fighting. I don’t know why this image came to mind, but it did, so I kept reading. As I read further into the poem the “movie scene” seemed to develop more and more in my minds eye. The last stanza caught me a little off-guard because it was so seemingly gruesome with all of the talk of blood. Unlike most poems this one seemed more like a story and I think that’s because of the mental image that automatically came to me somehow. I reread this poem and decided that- to me- the last stanza isn’t meant to be disturbingly gruesome, but is meant to show the true emotional pain felt by the victim of the situation.
I really like how Alvarez starts off by shutting down the city and describing how the fog takes over. It’s almost as if he is describing that single moment you hear the worst news you can think of. Everything shuts down and confusion (fog) sets in. He then continues to write as the victim (who I picture as a girl) and she says that her words have all run out and her mouth unable to form any. It’s in that moment that nothing matters, all other pain- no matter how bad- doesn’t seem to hurt, just like the line where he wrote “Later came violence./Not that you felt it or cared…” Reading through the poem was like walking through a treacherous path of bad news, worlds crashing down, confused thoughts, lack of emotion and physical feeling (to the pain) then transforming into anger still flooded with confusion, finally breaking down and feeling the pain, everyone around you slowly coming back into view and seeing your pain and then reflecting back on him and how he tore you to peices… such is the line “While his fingers, unformed, unerring,/hold us and pick us to pieces.”
I think it was a greatly written poem and it took a lot to digest and understand. It was a little more difficult than most poems I choose, but I thoroughly enjoyed and I think it is slowly becoming one of my favorites.
