“Bottle Fly,” by Grady Chambers, appears in the Sept/Oct 2019 issue of KROnline.
The opening of Grady Chambers’s “Bottle Fly” is a command not only to the poem’s speaker but also to the reader: “Pay attention.” And of course this is what poems require of us. We “pay” attention in that when we spend our time and mental energy, we are saying that what we notice, what we think about, is worth it.
“Bottle Fly” is a poem of observation. It has a setting, characters, dialogue, and conflict, but the poem is lyric—and interior—at its core. There is the woman thinking aloud, and there is the speaker, listening and watching along with us—yes, paying attention:
I never understood my friends
when they were seventeen
who said what they wanted in life
was just a husband and a child.
She had stopped on the sidewalk
to touch a flower
she did not take. I never wanted that
for certain. I think they thought to have those things
meant that they’d have love.
Chambers masterfully lets the dialogue and the images release meaning in the poem—the flower the woman touches but does not pick, for example, and the “earthmover stopped at a traffic light . . . rolling imperceptibly forward.” The power of the poem, for me, is in its understatement. It takes both skill and confidence to show restraint in a poem—and it also demonstrates faith in the reader. It is tempting to oversell ideas in a poem because we don’t trust that the metaphors have done the work.
The observations in “Bottle Fly” are recorded through the lens of early adulthood—that time of decision-making, that time of crafting the life we want—and the conversation the beloved is mostly having with herself, out loud. How much of adult life is determined by the choices we make consciously, and how much by momentum or inertia—the choices we make by not choosing? (“Let’s never be like that, we used to say / about the couples around us / eating in silence.”) What is a midlife crisis, after all, but a reckoning with one’s own earlier decisions? I can’t help but think of the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime”:
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house
With a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, well
How did I get here?
“How did I get here?” indeed. (As Chambers writes in stanza three: “What happened? . . . Each evening we started on the couch / and ended tangled in the same / single sheet. Five years had passed.”) In the beginning of the poem, the beloved implores the speaker to pay attention; by the end the observation is downplayed:
I’m really just watching,
she said, and rested
the tip of a single finger of her left hand
against the glass in greeting
to one little bottle fly
resting on the window’s other side.
But in this fine poem, as in life, there is no “just” watching. What we watch—what we pay attention to—gives us away.