The word shadow only appears twice in the 42 lines of Brian Turner’s richly layered “The Sweetest Way to Drown,” and both times near the end of the poem, at that.
But those shadows--one of a young boy nearly drowning in a swimming pool, the other cast by the boy’s mother and “the man who would become my father” alone in their own world--become a compelling metaphor that ties together the cascading images of a poem that recalls the varied stories unfolding at a backyard party nearly fifty years ago.
That day, “I actually watched my parents fall in love,” Turner says. That day, too, he came close to drowning, at age nine and in the sweetest way, as witness to his parents’ love story.
Turner is an award-winning poet and memoirist, whose first book, Here, Bullet, a collection of poems drawn from his experience as a soldier in combat, brought him widespread recognition nearly twenty years ago. In the time since, he has authored the memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, as well as four more collections of poetry, among other creative pursuits. Still, he said, “The Sweetest Way to Drown” was not an easy poem to write.
For one thing, he had tried previously to treat some of the elements in the poem as discrete experiences, from “me drowning” to his mother's car crash and his father's heart attack to the lovers in the pool.
And those weighty shadows. Because sometimes even a masterful writer finds that words alone can’t really carry the meaning. Sometimes, it takes the mystery of poetry to get beneath the surface of the ineffable.
“I can’t really express the shadow part, but I feel it in my body,” he said.
One line he arrived at did some heavy lifting in helping him to focus the poem, while both respecting the independence of the stories he wanted to tell and recognizing the ways in which his parents' shadows and his had at once separated and inextricably merged.
“I wanted to describe too much. Then I got ‘I’m only nine . . ‘”
“ . . . And I am only nine,
but even I know when a promise is being made,”
“That line helped the poem to telescope,” he said. “I knew then that there was something there.”
Turner, who had come to prominence as a “war poet,” a soldier with an MFA degree, pointed out that the soldier and the poet share a common imperative: “Always pay attention to the details.”
In the case of “The Sweetest Way to Drown” that also meant opening the poem up to include not only the family dramas at its core, but also a larger world in which they lived, “being alive in times like these” in the working class “blue jean” world of his childhood.
“I’m glad those lines made it into the poem,” Turner said, as did “Old man Kelman, drunk as usual” and the uncle, like a first father, who saved the boy from drowning.
On the other hand, he admits to struggling a bit with the lines about “fireworks over Fresno,”—was the image too easy?—but decided he wanted it to “time stamp” the story in America’s bicentennial year of 1976.
Even the first line of the poem exhibits that necessary attention to detail. In it, he said there is ‘an inversion of what I usually do,” when he wrote “In the pool, two lovers float . . .” rather than his more usual “Two lovers float . . .” but his ear told him to rearrange the sentence.
And then there’s the final word in the poem, a word he said he’s particularly proud of because it does “double duty” when spoken aloud.
So, here is Brian Turner’s compelling poem:
The Sweetest Way to Drown
In the pool, two lovers float on inflatable rafts
as if still in bed from the night before, oblivious
to everything around them. And I am only nine,
but even I know when a promise is being made,
a bond that will carry them through the decades
ahead, lean times when welding and tending bar
won’t always be enough, and later, too, when a surgeon
wires his heart back together, and when the car crash
shatters vertebrae in her neck. How cautious and tender
they’ll be in the shower then, tracing the sutured furrow
that holds him together before guiding liquid soap
between the bars of the halo and down through
the auburn channels of her hair. These things
we can share. What it’s like to watch your parents
fall in love. As they did poolside that summer’s day.
Their friends drinking since noon and laughing
in the grass by the smoking grill, hard liquor
poured into tumblers of ice as they told stories
about hospitals and jail and weekends and work,
and mostly their stories were just about being
alive in times like these. And that’s when Old Man
Kelman, drunk as usual and slurring about his service
on the HMS Hood, leaned over with his dead eyes
and his dead breath to startle me, then turned away
just as my heels caught the concrete lip of the pool
and I wheeled backwards through the afternoon light—
falling wordless through the ether, a frightened little boy
who didn’t know how to swim, though the water
gathered me in its blue embrace, otherworldly,
cold and clear, spangled with the American Bicentennial
that would cast fireworks over Fresno that night.
And in that moment, I couldn’t see the rescue coming—
my Uncle Paul, fully-dressed, diving headfirst into the air
at the far end of the pool. I simply watched the number 9
rise higher and higher as I sank towards my own shadow,
which lay on the bottom alongside the shadows cast down
by my mother and the man who would become my father.
And I didn’t panic as I sank. My thoughts seemed to mirror
the water. That clarity. I remember it well. It was all so tranquil.
I miss it still. The two lovers drifting side by side, their silhouettes
merging into one. And I held my breath for as long as I could.
And I watched the two of them as they disappeared into the sun.
—Brian Turner
from The Goodbye World Poem (Alice James Books, September 2023)
Brian Turner is the author of a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, and five collections of poetry— Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise; with The Wild Delight of Wild Things, The Goodbye World Poem, and The Dead Peasant’s Handbook due out from Alice James Books in Fall, 2023. He’s the editor of The Kiss and co-editor of The Strangest of Theatres. A musician, he’s written and recorded albums with The Interplanetary Acoustic Team, including 11 11 (Me Smiling) and American Undertow with The Retro Legion. His poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, and Harper’s, among other fine journals, and he was featured in the documentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, nominated for an Academy Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he’s received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Orlando with his dog, Dene, the world’s sweetest golden retriever.
Just an Insistent Sidebar
I confess. I didn’t manage to talk with Brian Turner without digressing from time to time to nudge the conversation to also include the immediacy and power of the war poems that first brought him to fame. I won’t try to get into all of that now, other than to encourage readers to know his first book, Here, Bullet, as well as the current crop (incredibly, he has three collections coming out this fall).
But what is also compelling is the work he has done, and continues to do, in fostering cross-cultural conversations with Iraqi poets, following in the footsteps of the William Joyner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences, which pioneered similar work with U.S. veterans of the war in Viet Nam and their Vietnamese counterparts.
At the same time, he has been active leading writing workshops for his fellow veterans “so we can write our way into the rest of our lives.” For that work, he was featured in the documentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which was nominated for an Academy Award.
In both of those pursuits, I can’t help but remember the poets Richard Hugo and Charles Simic. Hugo served as a bombardier in WWII and Simic was a child in Belgrade when some of those bombs fell around him, a conjunction the two poets discovered when they met years later.
Here's that story.