Marriage Kills People

In Media Res, by Michael McFee

His waist,
like the plot,
thickens, wedding
pants now breathtaking,
belt no longer the cinch
it once was, belly's cambium
expanding to match each birthday,
his body a wad of anonymous tissue
swung in the same centrifuge of years
that separates a house from its foundation,
undermining sidewalks grim with joggers
and loose-filled graves and families
and stars collapsing on themselves,
no preservation society capable
of plugging entropy's dike,
under the zipper's sneer
a belly hibernation-
soft, ready for
the kill.

     This one's a toughie. Like the title implies, there's a heck of a whole lot going on for a one-sentence poem. But the tempo at which I read this poem is interesting; the weird spacing of the poem isn't only to manipulate the shape (literally) of the poem, but to push or pull the reader to speed up or slow down. I've noticed from the poetry readings we have in class that the shorter the line is, the slower (or the more emphasis) we place on the critical word in that line. So, as I was reading this alone in my room and creeping myself out, I noticed on the second reading that I always unintentionally rushed the longest lines in the middle while I spoke slowly in the beginning and the end lines. I think it has to do with the fact that we want to read each line in the same amount of time; for instance, if it took me 3 seconds to read "His waist," then my mind would want to use up only 3 seconds to read all the other lines too. At least, that's what I think my brain is doing. This completely deviates from a more common sonnet or ballad, which more or less contains the same syllables in every line and therefore takes up the same amount of time to read. So, in addition to giving the poem this beer belly-like shape, the spacing gives it verbal shape that's interesting to note.

     Sadly, that was the easy part. On to the content of the poem itself…let's separate the different topics the poet addresses. From what I discerned, there seems to be a fat man at his wedding, a small, yet repulsive discussion about skin and tissues, the world spinning out Of control in a centrifuge, an introduction to energy and disorders, which is then backed by the man's fatness which somehow is able to kill. Sounds about right. And like I said before, the shape of the poem almost takes a form of the belly of a man who's lost control. In media res is a popular phrase for many books and movies, which describes something as being "in the middle of the action." Open up a book, and it starts with a war before going backwards. Or see the beginning of a movie, which starts at the end of the whole story.

     The action here isn't "action-y" in a physically strenuous sense; it's in the middle of a drastic change in someone's condition, which falls in line with the media res claim. This fat man is about to get married, a huge next step in the process of life. However, the focus of the first couple of lines isn't about his wedding, but about his size. The wedding itself has already made him a different person, at least physically; he's gained a lot of weight so that his belt doesn't rest the same way. Then it goes on describing his belly's skin, which I strangely find revolting even though it wasn't described with any particularly vulgar words. Comparing this to a plant's "skin," I think, is the reason why. It de-humanizes the man's stomach to be this nonliving flap of plant tissue. The use of "expanding" brings to mind unbaked bread in an oven, growing to the point of explosion. It's really gross.

     And describing his body like a "wad;" gum, unshapely pile of blargh, comes to mind. Soft and malleable, the wad swings in a "centrifuge," the second word in addition to "cambium" that relates to some form of biology and nature. A centrifuge, as I've come to learn in biology, is a machine that spins tubes of blood extremely fast to separate the red blood cells (the living matter) from the nonliving plasma, which includes white blood cells and other extraneous liquids. From this point, many things come unhinged in the poem; a house comes off from its foundation, joggers are pulled away from sidewalks and dead people from the grave start shaking while the stars fall from their ceiling--eek. His home will be ruined, his efforts of maintaining his body weight by jogging, his relationship with his relatives, even his dreams (characterized by the stars) are flipped upside down, shaken and broken. This rapid movement and spinning can't be controlled, as he alludes to this shaking as an "entropy" that can't be tamed. He equates this spinning to a measure of disorder. As the zipper "sneers"--either in reference to the sound sneeeee that a zipper makes, or to its ironic and mean smile it makes as it's being zipped up--it contains this craziness that is his belly, his spinning, his disorder, behind a zipper jacket that is soft to the touch, but ready to explode.

     So what is he saying about this obese groom? In the middle of the action, we seem to see a future of his marriage as the growing of disorder and craziness, exemplified by his growing stomach (which is also stereotypical of men who get married). It seems that the poet is saying that marriage unhinges you, in the worst possible way. Behind the curtain of a happy marriage is a certain amount of uncontrollable disorder borne out of this marriage that will eventually ruin his life, if not his marriage. A fitting title then, for in the middle of his wedding is actually the beginning of his downfall as he walks down the isle with pants that, already, seem ill-fitting.