In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Planning a Rescue
  • Alfred Nicol (bio)

First, find someone in need of one. If you find yourself near water, you know where to look. Your son, maybe—maybe your lover’s daughter—

will have drifted out too far. Will the moonlit surface hold? Hard to tell from where you are. Hard to see what you are told

by way of gesture, silhouette, shadows moving at a crawl. You may get your collar wet with no one swimming there at all.

Be watchful of high places, too, office buildings, bridges, wells . . . Wells are not high places, true. They’re deep and deep is something else.

Either toss a coin inside and make a wish to have it back, or wish to have that wish denied and wish for something else you lack.

But if you wish to save the kind for whom the lack of footing’s thrilling, you’ve got to seize him from behind; he must be rescued though unwilling. [End Page 145]

A ledge has something to attract the man who feels misfortune calling; he’ll climb high as the odds are stacked against him, where he’ll dream of falling

because it feels like flying or because it feels like letting go, like something he’s been waiting for, a feeling that he used to know.

Though his prospects may be dim, one step will get him clear of debt. You’re taking that away from him when you come running with a net.

It’s difficult to let the lost meander any way they choose, preferring that to being bossed; hard to watch the loser lose

and hold your tongue, and let him think he’s getting somewhere up ahead. But we’d as soon come to the brink as we would let ourselves be led.

If the gods could trade their places with us travellers here below, they would seldom lift their faces to ask the straightest way to go.

It can be unpleasant, saving people who are desperate. They’re apt to think their misbehaving is the very thing for it.

Let’s save a man from being drowned. Be careful if he’s one of those [End Page 146] who tends to swing his arms around. You’ll catch an elbow in the nose.

Hook your arm around his chest. It’s almost like a wrestling match. You have to hope you wrestle best. The drowned are murder to detach. [End Page 147]

Alfred Nicol

Alfred Nicol is the recipient of the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award for 2013. Nicol’s book of poetry, Elegy for Everyone, published in 2009, was chosen for the first Anita Dorn Memorial Prize. He received the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award for an earlier volume, Winter Light. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Dark Horse, The Formalist, First Things, and other journals.

...

pdf

Share