Sign Inventory, Week 4

"Swim Test" by: Jehanne Dubrow

In the swimming pool, my husband is a stone
that cannot float-- he's made for running
through our neighborhood, which leads him down

to where the concrete goes to gravel, then turns
to harrowed fields at the edge of town,
where wind pushes through the corn,

and the crow that drags itself up sounds like a man
drowning. All things sound like drowning if you listen.
There are other guys who sink, the ones grown

up in cinder-block cities who have never seen
the beach, or the ones like my husband, too thin
for buoyancy. They have learned to inflate their own

shirts, blow bubbles of air in the sleeves, fasten
the limbs together, a raft that holds them on
the surface long enough. After a deepwater jump, then

a fifty-yard swim, the sailors lie prone.
They're flotsam drifting in the ocean.
The hardest part is playing dead, to be broken,

inert, when what the body wants is motion,
to kick like a sprinter toward the finish line,
at least to tread water, not to breathe in it.


Sign Inventory:

• The majority of the poem contains enjambed lines.
• The sentences (6 total throughout) are inconsistent in terms of length and structure. The first period isn't shown until eight lines in-- making the sentence long winded, streaming. The next sentence, immediately following, ends somewhat abruptly. The method seems to be recursive with the following lines as well. 
• Each stanza contains three lines, and every stanza contains slant rhyme, such as: "listen" and "fasten" and "broken," "thin" and "then,"prone" and "on," "line" and "in," etc..
• The text sets up a dichotomy between running and swimming, and between a rural and an urban setting/landscape.
• The text also moves from a very specific character (the speaker's husband) and what exactly the character is good--and not--at, to a much more broad elaboration about men unknown ('there are other guys', 'they', 'their') and how they (in contrast to the speaker's husband) swim for a particular purpose.
• The poem's final sentence appears the most ambiguous and open-ended of all. The speaker's information is highly exclusive and vague; providing a copious stream of adjectives reflecting mobility and inertia, and a seemingly unexplained desire for preferring one over the other.