[Michael Cantor]

Thicker Than Gravy
by Nick MacKinnon

Twenty for Christmas dinner
and you sit in a pool of your own blood,
mother, sister, sons and daughter,
each clutching different halves of you,
as though they had pulled your cracker
and won a pair of Wedgwood eyes,
two elongated shins, a freckle archipelago.
Then come cousins, nieces, aunts,
whose wishbone share is freakish:
knife-long fingers, a preference for winter,
lost lisps, flawless digestion, a tendency
to dislocation. At the business end,
his hands too full of steel for crackers,
a man is carving under the skeptical eye
of his father-in-law. He shares your bed,
the children, and a name that exiles yours
to cancelled passports, the slit envelopes
of stashed Valentines, and rapt italic
inscriptions on the sellotaped fly leaves
of caramelising paperback books.


Comments:

Nick MacKinnon's "Thicker Than Gravy" is not a light verse piece, but it tickles my funny bone as it captures the stressful nature of supposedly-festive holiday gatherings. Granted, I am more introverted than most; but my blood pressure already starts to climb at the first line's ominous mention of "Twenty for Christmas dinner", and the tension only builds from there. Crackers, those instruments of jollity containing jokes and prizes, illustrate the competing demands of "mother, sisters, sons and daughter,/ each clutching different halves of you" (in addition to providing a clever metaphor for phenotype dispersal). And rather than presenting your husband as host, in pleasant small-talk with your father, the poem reports on two apparent strangers--"a man" and "his father-in-law"--one of whom tensely conducts some "business" with a knife under the unforgiving gaze of the other, at the remote end of the table. Ah, yes, a vivid portrait of one's kith and kin, one's nearest and dearest, gathered to celebrate peace on earth!

Holiday or not, whenever my spouse and I spend time with our families of origin, I think of the disturbingly humorous second line of this poem: "you sit in a pool of your own blood". There is, indeed, something very uncanny about recognizing "different halves" of the person "shares your bed" dispersed among near-strangers whom one sees only once or twice a year. This most intimate of one's intimates suddenly seems eerily unfamiliar--just one creature among many populating this foreign gene pool. At such times, one might question whether blood (genetic relationship) really is more substantive than water (relationship established by religious ceremony, such as baptism or matrimony)...or, as suggested by the poem's title, is thicker even than the gravy of a holiday dinner.

The unsettling use of second-person narration poses an even closer-to-home question of identity to the reader: "The poem is being addressed directly to me. Who, exactly, am I in this scenario?" The "you" of the poem remains unclear, until the reference to "a name that exiles yours" clues us into the fact that "you" must be someone's wife. Whose? The most likely candidate seems the knife-wielding man with "hands too full of steel for crackers". Even as this identity is established, the poem simultaneously dislodges it, by acknowledging that this woman's ties to this man have profoundly changed that identity. Before she married him, her maiden name graced passports and Valentines, connoting freedom and romance. Now, those passports are "cancelled" and those Valentines are "slit" and "stashed". So the question remains: who is this woman now?

Despite the dark tone of the poem, I believe that the answer is a happy one. I think that the mysterious man who "shares your bed, / the children, and" so much else is the poet himself, humbly viewing himself in unflattering terms, through his wife's eyes. I suspect that he is the one who wrote those "rapt italic / inscriptions" on the fly leaves of those books, as courtship gifts. I think that those now-tattered paperbacks are murder mysteries and thrillers, and that he is writing this gruesome poem for her because he knows that his wife will find it amusing. As do I.

One cannot miss the over-the-top references to knives and blood; the enumeration of body parts after the dismemberment of crackers; the "dislocation" and "lost lisps" of "freakish" aging relatives; the "sellotaped" and "caramelising" paperbacks. But while danger and decay permeate this piece, affection and humor remain alive and kicking in this couple's relationship. I certainly get a kick out of them in this mischievous poem.

Submitted by Julie Stoner