A recurring theme in Megan Thoma’s poetry is the feeling of being trapped in a failing relationship. Her poem “Fine. Fine. Our Love Is An Ocean” explores that theme in a memorable and powerful way. Thoma uses magic realism and comedic narrative in a fresh and unusual way to explore her subject matter (a hallmark of her writing in general, actually. If you can find her excellent chapbook, There Are Things, I recommend it.
The poem’s momentum carries the reader/listener almost entirely through the poem, relying on the charming quirkiness of the speaker’s descriptions and Thoma’s vivid imagination to create a very impossible but totally believable scenario: the speaker’s husband offers her the gift of living underwater because she’d said she’d always wanted to live near the beach.
The complete wrongheadedness of that gift (a houseful of ocean and fish is the farthest thing from owning beachfront property) and the not merely bizarre but also dangerous perspective of the husband character are well-drawn. Crazy is actually a difficult characterization to pull of well, because writers often opt for characters who are too inhuman. What makes the husband character’s choices so creepy and realistic is the oddness of his perspective; it’s only a hair away from being romantic, but it’s wrong in the worst possible direction.
The details in the poem seem at first to be there simply for providing a compelling story, and it isn’t until the end, when the poem shifts mood suddenly, that the creepiness of the details rush back into our minds — the husband actually thinking the idea was a good one, that his solution is to propose cutting gills into the speaker’s throat, but most importantly, that the speaker actually considers going along with “his way- the easy way” long enough that her life is in real danger — these are carefully piled on us. The poem’s mood changes and the speaker ends the poem with an alarming and brilliant simplicity ( “I ran. I ran, and I ran, and I ran” ). This stands in a sharp contrast to the complex and vivid imagery and diction in the entire rest of the poem, and is what gives the ending the incredible rhetorical power it has.
Up til now the speaker has been almost drowning us in description and detail, but once outside the house, her diction shifts to this simplicity that is almost stark, communicating with this shift the speaker’s sudden and necessary change of perspective. This is coupled with the repetition and the rhythm of the final lines, which are also unique in a largely chatty poem.
The end result is a radical linguistic shift from the loquacious to the rhetoric of urgency, and we can feel it, without the poet ever having to tell us overtly that the speaker has had a paradigm shift. She doesn’t need to tell us because she has allowed us to witness the speaker’s thought process as it happens. Brilliant.