A Dangerous Place by Chelsea B. DesAutels

from A Dangerous Place

It seems a beautiful spring though I spend most of it indoors

watching through warped glass small tree buds burst into full green,

the ice crystals on the edge of Lake Nokomis relaxing & spreading

into waves lapping the bottom of bright canoes & sometimes,

near the shore, for the first time this year, a large white heron

landing on spidery legs. An omen, I tell myself: a bird too smart to make

a dangerous place its home & I carry that with me to the hospital.

The conflation in this first segment of the poem of the beatific natural scenery that the narrator is watching from her window with “a dangerous place” and the movement to the hospital sets up a kind of internal tension within the poem that carries it through to the end. There are a couple of other tiny tensions like this present: the beauty of the scene vs. the narrator indoors watching through “warped glass” & the heron landing both “sometimes” and “for the first time this year”.

And I think of the heron when the doctors say congratulations

you’re pregnant, let’s shine a light to greet your baby.

And I think of the heron when they say oh sorry it seems your womb

is more cavern than nest & no, it’s no baby at all.

Presumably the narrator is thinking of the heron, in part, to remind her not to make the hospital, a dangerous place, her own home, but also perhaps to not practice attachment to an idea of what is happening with her body, avoiding a mental place that is also dangerous.

What have you been feeding this thing. And I think of the heron

skimming the lake surface with spread wings—how could I not—

as we watch on-screen the monster burst into ten thousand gray moths.

The inclusion of the phrase “What have you been feeding things thing.” is odd here, as it interrupts what had been a repeating structure of “And I think of the heron,” and I wonder if this is meant to connect us back to the spending of the spring indoors, watching life through warped glass… as if somehow the remove from the cycle of life outside had caused the birth of the “monster [that] burst into ten thousand gray moths,” (an amazing image).

And I hear the echo of wings in my belly. And I feel the fury

of wings in my lungs. And when the doctors tuck a port

above my breast I think of the heron disguising a large bed

in marshy grasses. And I imagine the white sheets as heron wings.

And the whirring machines are white eggs.

And the worried voices are sunlight on water.

The use of the repeated “And” structure works really well in this poem, giving it a cadence like a kind of invocation or prayer. The repeated reference to wings evokes the freedom of flight, escape from the confined circumstances of a hospital bed. The “white sheets” and “white eggs” contrast to the “gray moths” from the previous lines.

I do wonder about the tension between “sometimes” and “for the first time” in the beginning part of the poem, and if we’re not meant to wonder if the narrator in the first section has actually already been through the hospital and is, in part, remembering the many times of thinking about the first time that the heron came that spring and what it later came to represent for her.