Hi Baby

[Lykren]

'Hi, baby', I overhear
and I try hard
not to walk out
into the fog

and on into the river
where a white stone stares up
like a beginning.

The black water's cold
as I dip my hand,
my fingers swimming
through the gentle current.

It's almost soft, so smooth is it,
and comes out dry immediately.
Then the wind lifts

and stops my thumping chest
with its grasp and chill.
I'm wet

up to the cheeks.

[blank|verse]

Another of your poems which dwell on a difficult, presumably failed, relationship, Lykren.

The jarringly sweet title ‘Hi baby’, repeated in the first line, sets up the expectation that this will be a rather clichéd love poem, before quickly undermining that with a desperate scene of a seeming suicide attempt. (Although the phrase ‘I try hard | not to walk out’ leaves open the possibility that this only happened in the narrator’s mind; but that’s uncertain.) The reader is left to piece together exactly who the speaker and addressee of this comment are. But we get the impression it’s not what the narrator wants to hear.

There are always some captivating images and phrases in your poems. Here, I found the white stone staring ‘like a beginning’ very effective. As we read on, we get the idea it could be the beginning of the end, of course.

Just a couple of suggestions: you might consider cutting ‘is it’ from the end of line 12, as it reads awkwardly. And do you need ‘as I dip my hand’ (line 9) at all? I also find putting ‘up to the cheeks’ as a separate stanza a little melodramatic, as it draws attention to itself a bit too much. It might be more effective just to slip the phrase in more subtly.

Engagingly bleak.