A Morbid Poem For Summer

I've been a bit obsessed with Weldon Kees, an exceedingly gloomy author of extraordinarily lovely poems who vanished in 1955, since reading Anthony Lane's profile of him in the New Yorker in 2005.  To me, he's been the poet who best expresses the heartbreaks and disappointments of adulthood, while also making life seem piercing and beautiful.  I'll have more to write about him at a later date, but since I'm going swimming later today, I thought I'd share this poem, from The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (cheap and manageable, if your interest is piqued).

THE BEACH IN AUGUST

The day the fat woman

In the bright blue bathing suit

Walked into the water and died,

I thought about the human

Condition.  Pieces of old fruit

Came in and were left by the tide.

What I thought about the human

Condition was this: old fruit

Comes in and is left, and dries

In the sun.  Another fat woman 

In a dull green bathing suit

Dives into the water and dies.

The pulmotors glisten.  It is noon.

We dry and die in the sun

While the seascape arranges old fruit,

Coming in with the tide, glistening

At noon.  A woman, moderately stout,

In a nondescript bathing suit,

Swims to a pier.  A tall woman

Steps towards the sea.  One thinks about the human

Condition.  The tide goes in and goes out.

Kees is, to put it mildly, somewhat strange about women.  And you know you're not in good shape if a perfectly pleasant visit to the beach has you thinking about death and rot.  But I think that's one of the joys of reading Kees, quite aside from his vivid and precise language: he's a reminder that things could be worse.