Tracy K. Smith's Poems: Credulity,Diego, and El Mar

Amanda Lynch
Reading Poetry
April 8th 2014
Tracy K. Smith’s ‘Credulity’ ‘Diego,’ and ‘El Mar’ Tracy K. Smith’s three poems, ‘Credulity’, ‘Diego,’, and ‘El Mar’, all deal with very similar themes and ideas. Loss and love, the being and ending and absence of relationship, are all present within these poems. Taken as a whole, they present a picture of Smith’s poetic attitudes and ideologies, and grant insight into what gives her poems both their beauty and their resonance. ‘Credulity’ opens with a couple who are together in a bodily sense but it’s implied they’re not really in love because their minds are far from reason. In the second verse Smith writes about how she “would like to know everything about convincing love to give me what it does not possess to give” indicating that she has looked for things in love or in her lover that she could not get from them, and now she wants to know how to live with the absence of these things, as she writes “and then I would like to know how to live with nothing. Not memory. Nor the taste of the words I have willed you whisper into my mouth.” This suggests that the relationship with the lover has ended and that the speaker’s lover was unable to love the speaker. The sonnet ‘Diego,’ begins with the metaphor “Winter is a boa constrictor contemplating a goat,” setting a dark tone for the rest of the poem. Like ‘Credulity,’ it seems to be divided into two parts. The first part is a description of the chill and motionless winter. Smith describes the frozen stillness and applies it to herself “My limbs settle into stony disuse”, placing herself in the cold and hostile winter. The shift occurs in the last line of the second stanza, where she writes “I would rather your misuse, your beard smelling of some other woman’s idle afternoons.” This line suggests that the antecedent scenario to this poem is the dissolution of a relationship in the face of the lover’s infidelity. In the face of the winter, the speaker would rather be with her unfaithful lover than endure the cold loneliness, and it is though love itself has spurned her, as can be seen from the lines “Lately the heart of me has grown to resemble a cactus whose one flower blooms one night only under the whitest, the most disdainful of moons.” However, her heart continues to bloom, or to love, in spite of the fact that it has been disdained. ‘El Mar’ is a contemplation of the speaker’s marriage. She compares it to being in the middle of an ocean in a tiny floating house. She says she liked it best when there was nothing that she “could or could not see.” However, looking back on it she realizes “But I know there was more.” She reflects that “Marriage is a rare game, its only verbs: am and are.” First person, present tense, ‘being’ verbs in singular and plural form. The order they are listed in suggests that in spite of the end of the marriage, there is still a sense in which they “are” even at the same time as they separately “am”, (joint being still existing within separate being) and that this same duality existed within the marriage in its inverted form (separate being still existing within joint being). She goes on to write “I aged. Some time ago we sailed past bottles, the strangest signs inside…” This shows that with time, things changed, but she did not understand the signs, perhaps willfully. She then wonders “Why didn’t we stop? Didn’t sirens sing our names in voices that begged with promise and pity?” Her question is somewhat ambiguous. It is unclear whether she means “why didn’t we end our relationship sooner?” or “why didn’t we prevent our relationship from ending?” when she asks “Why didn’t we stop?” It seems to be a little bit of both.
These are poems that exist in a state of paradox. It can perhaps be seen most clearly in ‘El Mar’, with the simultaneous existence of joint being/separate being in the relationship and after the relationship. It is both about the being of marriage and the end of marriage. In ‘Credulity’, there is a physical togetherness at the same time as there is mental distance. This dissonance is also in the second verse, where the speaker wants both to have love and to be completely without it, lacking even its memory. ‘Diego,’ contains a more subtle version of this: although the lover is absent, the relationship lives in in the speaker’s memory in spite of its flaws. Her heart blooms with love under a metaphoric distant and reciprocating light, the “disdainful moon.” Taken as a whole, these poems are about loss and love. Rather than being separate entities, this loss and this love are part of the same thing. The loss, or the death, of the relationship is present within the life of the relationship. In the same way, the relationship’s life is also present within its death. Neither exists wholly untouched by the other.
Smith’s poetry breaks down the barriers so often perceived between absence and presence, love and loss, life and death, and weaves them through each other. Each is colored by its counterpart, creating a sense of duality: these things are intrinsically a part of one another. Her poetry resonates with the realities of loving and losing that many have experienced, because so often they are tied together. The beauty of her poems stems from the way that she embraces this life and death as a whole.