There is this line in the middle of Stefania Gomez’s poem, Wreck. She’s referring to these firemen who were at the scene of her car wreck, and she says they couldn’t manage fear. I think this speaks to the heart of her poem. Where it negotiates between crisis and hilarity. Between life reckoning and straight-up weirdness. Because what’s really horrible about horribleness? To what degree can crisis be congruent with the ridiculous? It’s hard to say in Gomez’s poem, because it’s hard to determine the poem’s tone. Like when Ellen Bryant Voigt explains in her essay, “On Tone” (from The Flexible Lyric (University of Georgia Press, 1999)) that she can often tell what a poem is about by listening to its tone, but what do you do if the poem isn’t even sure what tone is appropriate? I’m not clear how I would personally ground Gomez’s poem. Is there a crisis? Is this all a big joke?

I like how this makes the poem strange to me. And I think the ridiculous might actually be providing a more reliable version of events. The poet’s been in a car crash that requires firefighters to cut her out of the car. But when they reach in to pull her out, they find themselves with handfuls of confetti and rubber chickens! WTF? You might be thinking. And the poem delights in that feeling. Like there’s a stability that comes with an incredulous reading.

Isn’t a car wreck supposed to be horrible? So why has the poet tilted her account of this one into nonsense? There are ducks actually moaning in this poem. The mast of a tall ship appears. But then the firefighters are suddenly pulling out the poet’s youth. And it all gets silent. It’s this switch-up that I find most interesting. Because it indicates there might be a purpose to all the ridiculousness from before. Maybe she feels people don’t take her seriously. Maybe in the midst of her personal disaster, people just laugh at her.

Then [the firemen] pulled out my youth,
at which point they became self-conscious
about their prior merriment and silence fell.

This moment turns the poem from silly-ish to somber-ish. Without committing wholly to the somber note that would possibly explain all the silliness away. Or it’s hard to take the joke out of the formal diction I hear in “prior merriment,” even as the poem has such a solid landing on its silence.

Personally, I don’t want the silliness explained away. I don’t want it tidied up so I understand why the poem opens onto it. I like the indeterminate feeling of solitude that closes the poem, and I like how that indeterminacy is made even more open-ended by all that fluff at the opening. Maybe the poet is describing the different extraneous parts of her relationship with this boyfriend, who could only shrug when he was pulled from the wreck. Maybe the poet is relieved to be alone, whether that means broken up from the boyfriend, or just apart from him long enough to feel her own space. And she’s realizing she’d wanted to be alone for a long time, but now she’s actually alone. And that sensation can be sometimes good and sometimes it can only serve a small reprieve. And sometimes it’s unclear how to fill the absences created by solitude.

Whatever sentiment the poet found when she ended the poem, it’s complex. Like what good emotions are. And the poem signals this complexity in a surprising way. Via the superfluous parts of the car wreck. Via the stable lens of silliness. Via the tonal shift lying in wait in the last third of the poem, and how that shift runs so strongly against the outrageousness directing the poem’s narrative. It’s the meaning of all these together that, for me, deliver an emotional complexity.

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