Poem Resources

Very often (and each time as fresh as the first), love ends. What metaphor would be apt enough to represent that terrible pain, a psychic ache so acute it echoes the worst of the physical? And what is it like to be so wounded? Poetry is full to the brim of what it is like to be the unrequited wounded one, but rarely do we find a poem that is also written from the perspective of the wounder—that awful other who inflicts the pain.

May Swenson’s poem, “Bleeding,” gives us both sides: a talking metaphorical knife stands in for the one sensibility, and a talking metaphorical cut speaks for the other. By formally inserting a jagged gap through the text, she creates a visual echo of a ragged cut. When the poem is read aloud (or silently, with the reader’s voice echoing in his or her own head), the gap becomes a prolonged caesura that alternately acts as missing punctuation (in the first line it might as well be a comma: “Stop bleeding said the knife.”) and emphatic pause. When the cut speaks, the gap sometimes suggests the difficult speech of one in great pain: “I would if I could said the cut.” I sense an invitation to read a tiny gasp there in the gap-width.

Swenson details, with eerie authenticity, the knife’s annoyance, the knife’s inability to be other than it is, the knife’s quiet desperation that turns quickly to a menacing threat (“Stop or I will sink in farther said the knife.”), the knife’s transfer of blame as a response to the manifestation of its damage (“If only you didn’t bleed said the knife I wouldn’t / have to do this.”). There is also, ultimately, a shared realization that the knife somehow benefits from the damage it does — the cutting, as messy as it is, as noisome as it is, ultimately leaves the knife feeling purified and ready to begin anew (clean and shiny again).

Neither speaker can account for why they are the way they are. The cutter knows it has to do as it does in order to stay alive; the wounded knows it must bleed (in spite of the punishment it provokes) in order to feel. And feel it must. Nothing can change these two. The poem enacts that wounding truth by brilliantly literalizing the process. Cuts must bleed and knife types must coolly cause damage.