Breaking Through, She Finds More Than a Poem

Her instructor for ENG 120 Intro to Creative Writing requires the next poem include a controlling metaphor. She has no interest existing anywhere near control, especially since she has so little of it lately. Ironic, she stews, how this professor has been controlling her creativity all semester. She scribbles:

the lines of this poem obey

the overweening taskmaster

until they simply refuse to obey

her ancient rules of prosody

Then decides against it. The second to last thing she needs is to be dropped from a class or sanctioned by the Honor Council; the very last thing she needs is to give her parents another reason to argue, blame each other, or step closer to the edge of divorce.

Coward complete, she hears the voice of poet Louise Bogan from “The Dream.” Bogan was from Maine. Maybe, she wonders, the sea cliffs of Maine would make a more aesthetic metaphor for this poetry assignment. Settling on the 110-foot Otter Cliff, she loses herself in tunnels of Googling the world’s most dramatic sea cliffs, and accidentally finds beauty.

That’s the way it happens these days. Beauty has become accidental.

One click, and she emerges in Dover. Drawn to the Shakespeare Cliff hovering over its bay, she marvels at the mottled slab of chalk. Last semester’s British lit professor went through endless sticks of chalk, tapping the dusty bones like some 19th Century mad man. They read G.K. Chesterton. Musings from his essay “A Piece of Chalk” stumble in and out of her mind as she relishes the control her fingertips wield upon a keyboard.

Scrolling whitecliffscountry.org.uk/, she finds the photo of a manmade platform. In 1988, the year her parents married, England sent six tunnel boring machines headlong into the sea toward France. The result was a world-famous portmanteau—the Chunnel. The other result was 111 acres of excavated spoil, the world’s biggest remainder. She resonates with the shapeless sediment birthed from the amniotic Channel. The child of a turbulent marriage, she feels granular, orphaned.

Engineers molded the sea chalk into the landscaped platform resting like the bones of creative writing students at the foot of Shakespeare Cliff. Or the well-attended tables in a seminar room at a university library where a young woman tries to write a poem.

The siren song of how this Chunnel was built amplifies. She leans in.

Known as a mole, a tunnel boring machine uses a circular cross section to bore blindly through rock strata, wet soil, sand, and of course chalk. It’s essentially a 50-foot tall spinning asterisk. This is my controlling metaphor, she realizes, and embraces the dueling British and French TBMs plowing in harmony toward the middle of the Channel as the emblem of her parents’ efforts to save their failing marriage. She finds the famous footage of workers breaking through the tunnel’s silty cervix waving their respective French and UK flags like some revival of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. She considers writing a hopeful poem, perhaps an aubade for new beginnings, but the red in the Union Jack distracts her.

Working the lunch shift at Southern Salad last Saturday, she watched blood drip onto the menus. An accidental asterisk bleeding into the blue plate specials like a laminated tricolore.  Her manager apologized, sheeted his face with paper napkins, and advised don’t ever snort coke. The cells inside his nasal cavity were dying. Cocaine’s chalk had cut off the oxygen to his membranes, leaving him with a perforated septum—literally boring a hole between his nostrils.

She doesn’t want to write about him.

She remembers a listicle in her mother’s Psychology Today. The author promised “7 handy tips on how to compromise” for couples who need to rekindle the love, trust, and intimacy that “may have been—well—compromised.” 7 handy tips to save a dying marriage.

Were there 7 handy tips to keep King Lear from plunging to his death? To recover from drug addiction? Or build a trio of 31-mile long tunnels under 200 feet of seawater? She remembers something about meeting in the middle or maybe it was always split the difference. Either way, the tips were proving rather unhandy on the cliff that had become her life at home. A life with so little control and too many asterisks followed by asides and we need to talk to you.

Write what you know, her professor, along with literally anyone remotely aware of the craft of writing, reiterates. Because handy tips and clichéd advice are the antithesis of accidental beauty, she decides to write what she doesn’t know. She researches hydraulic jacks and the Archimedes screw. Tunnel boring machines will control the poem she wants to write about her parents’ attempts at compromise.

The Chunnel is really three tunnels running parallel but not straight, she learns. The middle one is a smaller service tunnel that provides ventilation and emergency access. Perfect, she thinks, that’s me. She begins:

The American Society of Civil Engineers

elected the Channel Tunnel as 1 of the 7

modern Wonders of the World in 1994.

Breaking through is a type of accidental beauty; a poem, its flag.