I must have looked at Nimmo's poem a dozen times or more by now—I keep returning to the grey and frozen landscape into which the poet drives, which undoubtedly represents his own mortality. Each time, I am struck by how he holds up Berryman's life as a mirror to his own. Perhaps Nimmo wonders how he will choose to let go when he finally finds himself staring down death's barrel—will it be with notoriety, winning himself post-mortem fame, or will it be into obscurity, with a long, slow decline? (One wonders, why is it the jump into the unknown, and not the work itself, which seems to help achieve true notoriety?)
The essence of this poem's beauty is in its evocation of illness, suicide, and a frozen, isolated landscape with just a few penstrokes. But I most admire the simplicity in the way he frames the subject matter at the outset ("another trip to the doctor"); the image of the "turgid, green" Tallahatchie with the contrasting frozen Colorado, as pictured in his mind's eye; and the visual aspect of the final two lines. Simply by distancing the last line from the body of the poem, one hears the thud of the body falling onto solid ice. It is an end to the line and to Berryman's life, and an elegant and shattering way to end the poem.
another
trip to the doctor.
I drive over the Colorado River
and look from the bridge
to the water below.
it looks more like
the Tallahatchie than the Colorado
turgid and green.
looking closer
I see something washed up
on the far bank.
for a second
I believe it is a dead body
but as I cross over I realize it is
a large white
plastic garbage bag.
this reminds me
of John Berryman
who was celebrated by
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry
after his jump in Minnesota.
Berryman miscalculated
and hit the west bank of the Mississippi River.
not that it particularly mattered.
it was January in Minneapolis
and undoubtedly
the river
Kurt confesses:"This poem was inspired by an article I read on the career of John Berryman. It appears writers and artists have a propensity for self destruction and suicide. This has always piqued my morbid curiosity."
KURT NIMMO was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1952. In the late '70s, he co-edited the successful literary magazine The Smudge. In the '80s, he edited Planet Detroit. Kurt has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes for fiction, and two of his books were selected as "modern classics" by the Wormwood Review. In 2015, he began writing poetry after a twenty-year hiatus. He lives in Smithville, Texas with his wife and two cats.
