Breaking up in public 💔

Common Measure Season 1, Poem 4

A Public Scene

I saw two sitting on a bench.
She looked a touch disconsolate. 
I wondered what he’d said to her 
To parent her inchoate tear.

Or was it like a comforter—
His presence (though he didn’t throw 
His arm around, how could I know
He didn’t heal, by being near,

The hurt an absent criminal
Dispensed.) But either way while those 
Two figures stayed, no end was fixed;
The tear could yet still be revoked—

I saw it linger on the lid 
Unsure if it should drop or dry.

---

Vocab

“Inchoate”: nascent; just coming into being

Explanation

First stanza

The speaker of the poem sees two people sitting together on a bench. We see, through the eyes of the speaker, a tear forming in the woman’s eye. The speaker wonders what the man has said to the woman to make her upset. 

Second stanza

Then the speaker changes their mind: perhaps the man is comforting the woman. It doesn’t look like it, necessarily: they are not touching as they sit together. However, perhaps his mere proximity is a comforting, healing presence. 

Third stanza

The speaker finishes his thought from stanza 2: perhaps the person who caused the woman to cry is not in the scene. 

The poem works with unknowns and ambiguity. The speaker stops trying to guess who made the woman cry, and moves on to a possible resolution to the woman’s sadness. “The tear could yet still be revoked,” i.e. the hurt could be undone as long as the two figures remained there, speaking, whether the damage had been done by one of them or not. Only if the two parted would a rehabilitation become impossible.

Fourth stanza

In this two-line coda, our view hyperzooms in to see the tear “linger on the lid / Unsure if it should drop or dry.” The cropped image is a microcosm for the poem itself, unsure of its own outcome. 

Lesson(s)

1. Stick around and talk it out! Few are the problems that can’t be solved by conversation, many are the problems that can.

2. Be comfortable with ambiguity in writing. Explore ambiguity—and recognize that clarity can come through ambiguity. An ambiguous poem is not an unclear one.

3. Zoom in and out on scenes that you see in your writing.

4. Love is a conversation, not a feeling—and that’s a good thing—no matter what Hollywood tells us.

Poem stats; scansion

14 lines

Iambic tetrameter

“Rhyme scheme” (there are certainly end rhymes in the poem, but to say it has a “rhyme scheme” is a bit of a stretch. Anyways, if only to amuse you, here is how I scan it):

ABCD CEED FGHG HI