Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Michelle M. Tokarczyk’s "Working Into Night" is a meditation on physical fragility, intellectual labor, and the ever-present possibility of collapse—whether of the human body or the very earth itself. The poem weaves together the speaker’s act of writing and revising with a growing awareness of her heart condition, juxtaposing the unpredictability of her own body with the unpredictable seismic shifts of the San Andreas Fault. In doing so, Tokarczyk creates a powerful metaphor for human vulnerability, where personal and geological instability merge into a single, ominous force.

The poem opens with an image of exhaustion: "Reading my writing after writing all day, my neck, shoulders slacken." The physical toll of intellectual work is immediately apparent, as the act of crafting language becomes something that wears down the body. The speaker pushes her "fingers into [her] temples," trying to relieve tension, feeling "the pulse of [her] blood." This intimate, bodily awareness introduces the poem’s central preoccupation: the precariousness of life, of function, of the unseen mechanics keeping a person moving.

As the speaker revises her paper—preparing for an academic conference at the MLA (Modern Language Association) in San Francisco—she experiences a sudden acceleration of her heartbeat: "Sometimes as I sit quietly my heart doubles its pace, the result I?ve been told of a defective valve prolapsing, refusing to seal as it pumps blood." The language is clinical, yet charged with fear; the heart, an organ meant to sustain life, becomes unreliable. The medical terminology ("prolapsing," "refusing to seal") suggests an instability mirroring the seismic shifts that will come later in the poem.

The possibility of an embolism ("a displaced, renegade platelet lodges itself in a vessel") leads to speculation about loss: "I might lose control of one arm, peripheral vision in one eye, or have a major stroke and lose everything I know as me." Here, the poem reaches its most terrifying realization—not just the potential for physical debilitation, but the possibility of losing one?s self, the intellectual and emotional identity that makes existence meaningful. This fear is intensified by the uncertainty of when such a catastrophe might occur. The speaker’s condition is not unlike the geological forces beneath San Francisco—understood in theory, yet ultimately unpredictable in practice.

The poem then shifts outward, toward the famous "fault line jagging into [California’s] earth." Just as the body has veins and arteries that can suddenly fail, so too does the earth have fractures where pressure builds and releases in devastating shocks. Scientists, like doctors, can measure, observe, and hypothesize, but they "know everything but when it will strike." This parallel between the fault line and the speaker’s heart—both vulnerable to sudden, uncontrollable collapse—anchors the poem in a dual anxiety, where personal and planetary instability reflect one another.

The image of the woman in San Francisco, "going to the MLA," writing her notes as she rides BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), creates a sense of eerie normalcy, as though life continues unbothered by the inevitability of disaster. But then: "till the shaking begins below the earth, till water rushes in." This abrupt shift transforms the routine into catastrophe, just as the speaker’s own body could betray her at any moment.

The final lines return to the speaker, "leaning forward in a folding chair tapping my foot on the solid floor." The irony is palpable: the "solid floor" is only an illusion of stability, just as her own functioning heart is an illusion of control. She speaks her words, presenting her paper, but beneath her—a fault line, a heartbeat—something is waiting to rupture.

By intertwining the instability of the body with the instability of the earth, "Working Into Night" explores the limits of human control, the illusions of safety we construct, and the unsettling knowledge that disaster, whether personal or collective, is always looming. Tokarczyk’s poem does not offer resolution or comfort; instead, it leaves the reader in the same precarious space as the speaker, feeling the quiet, persistent tremors of uncertainty.

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