Poetry: “Seventeen” by Chris Dahl
Chris Dahl’s “Seventeen,” is sensuous, the kind of luxuriating poem that takes its time as it unwinds, carrying the reader through a journey that ends in a kind of time capsule of youth, beauty, nostalgia and dreamy remembering—for both author and audience. There is a confidence to the writing that isn’t always present in poetry built in memory. Dahl has taken control of her own narrative. Although the poem addresses the kind of naiveté that for some can be embarrassing—who likes to remember when they were young and stupid?—Dahl’s version of events celebrates the vainglory of youth. She takes us on a winding path through love and memory. And sometimes, a little nostalgia is a good thing. A country we can visit, but we don’t have to live there.
Seventeen
a drowned man to the creek.
But I was in love and the wind blew satin
across my bare legs angled on the dock; and
light cast tendrils through alder branches.
What did I know? Only the mechanical
sun shining and shining, unwinding the afternoon.
Oh, but the air moved and the water moved
and the down on my forearms
stirred from its golden bed. How physical
I was then: that loose purling in the limbs, that
languorous stretch before the plunge; my hands
breaking a trail my body eagerly followed.
Sleek, silky motion stroked for deeper water
and I slid through the tunnel
of myself becoming. Even the friction
was oiled and lubricated and sliding.
Until my lungs ached for release and I burst
to the surface, whipping water-wrung strands of hair
from my eyes. Then the world was golden,
green-boughed, weighted with such heat
that I would dry and be ready an hour later, back arching
for the fall into awareness, that bracing spring
compelled to rise from somewhere deeper
than the bottom. I threw myself
into resisting so that surrender seemed sweeter.
Mostly, I could forget that death accompanied
the lake’s strong current, that I, too, was so close to drowning,
overwhelmed by love and satin and light
and my body’s tan readiness.
Chris Dahl
Chris Dahl cups handfuls of murky pond-water hoping to reveal another world half-hidden in this one, Her chapbook, Mrs. Dahl in the Season of Cub Scouts, was published after winning Still Waters Press “Women’s Words” competition. Her poems have been placed in a wide variety of journals—most recently in The Mainstreet Rag and About Place Journal—and she has had poems nominated both for Best of the Internet and a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Olympia, Washington where she serves on the board of the Olympia Poetry Network and edits their newsletter.
