Notes on “After I Think I’m Done” by Sandra Fees
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Sandra Fees’ “After I Think I’m Done” purports, in its opening line, to be about grief. The poem circles environmental death and degradation, a pain so heavy that the speaker threatens to erode with the rest of the natural world (“I’ll slough / the last twig of belief”). Across stanzas of delicate syntax moving from the abstract to the ultra-specific, an “orca nudging her lifeless calf,” the poem finds it impossible to locate this nebulous end of grief. Instead, it contends with the desperate clutching of hope, an inability to stop caring, a refusal to be “done”. The near constant phrasal repetition in this piece sonically reproduces the speaker’s experience of a cycle of grief, perpetually stuck on bargaining, never quite ending; the echoes of this repetition extend the ethos of the poem, prohibiting both reader and speaker to allow numbness to permeate, and gently reminding us of the power we hold in our capacity for sensitivity.
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Notes on “After I Think I’m Done” by Sandra Fees
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by Grace Hopps
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Sandra Fees titles her poem after its opening line, beginning the poem, “After I think I’m done / with grief…” Setting readers down directly in the speaker’s emotion, Fees submerges them with images of the decline of the natural world, trees wilting and honeybee populations dwindling. But it is only when readers reach to the image of an orca “nudging her weightless calf” that they get a clue as to what the speaker is grieving; when combined with the later line, “as if I know what a mother needs,” the orca hints that the speaker may be coping with infertility or a general inability to be a mother. Whatever the speaker’s loss, the parallel Fees draws between her speaker’s grief and the death of ecosystems and their inhabitants admirably draws attention to the suffering outside themself while lamenting their inability to separate their own grief from that suffering and, thus, finally be done with it. Propulsive and moving, “After I Think I’m Done” is itself about being moved—and about exhaustedly wishing not to be.
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Notes on “After I Think I’m Done” by Sandra Fees
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This touching poem sinks us right into the middle of mourning. Our narrator says from the get-go that she’s “done / with grief”, as if saying it could make it so. Yet the external world here serves to both hold her hand to the flame and reflect her inner state, begging the question: do we see only what we want to see? When the image of the whale enters in the third stanza, repetitive language echoes the relentlessness of loss. The grieving cetacean tries to reject the basis of her sorrow while the narrator plays the bargaining game alongside her: “what if, what if”. We see she is not new to this type of wishful thinking. I was moved almost to tears by the last stanza, which seems to reveal the nature of the narrator’s loss, and the last line “as if I’d ever / ventured that salty sea” captures perfectly the certain bitter side of heartache. I enjoyed the form too, how the tidy quatrains with their offset final lines mimic the unending waves of the ocean, and yes, of grief.
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