A 50-foot wave of molasses—2,300,000 gallons of it—released in some manner yet unexplained, from a giant tank, swept over Commercial street and its waterfront from Charter street to the southerly end of North End park yesterday afternoon.
– The Boston Post, 1919
With Prohibition on the horizon
and the demand for rum about to take off
no one could convince the supervisor
that the structure of his tank was unsafe
or what would happen if it did combust –
twenty-one dead under fifty-foot waves.
It’s hard to imagine something so viscous
and laggard on the spoon lifting trains,
flooding alleyways and drowning horses –
like the timid neighbor who ups and trades
suburban life for a Swedish au pair,
leaves some rushed note about the constraints
of his job. I guess we could blame the affair
and the tank’s collapse on the need for more screws,
but such logic, though clever enough, offers
too simple an answer – unless, of course,
when we say screws we really mean bolts.
Bolt, after all, means both to tightly secure
and spring suddenly – and anyone who’s felt
locked down by the thick of their daily grind
must know that need to go nuts and bolt.
But it’s not just some convenient punch line,
(The Great Molasses Flood – vut a tidal!)
I have spent my life straddling the line
between feeling engaged and feeling bridled,
and bolt is proof that the two can share
a single body, meet in the middle –
though even then, I’ve learned, more layers
reveal themselves like Russian nesting dolls –
insides turn into outsides, beasts become lairs
to bellies, bellies to parietal cells.
And it’s all so unreliable – pin down
one truth and out pours a flood of reversals.
Yet we keep digging, confident that we’re bound
to reach some center – no longer sure, though,
if by bound we mean certain. Or tied down.
Or, perhaps, even leap away.
Ben Berman is the author of three books of poems and the collection of essays, Writing While Parenting, a 2023 Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year. He has won the Peace Corps Award for the Best Book of Poetry, has been shortlisted twice for the Massachusetts Book Awards and has received awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, New England Poetry Club and Somerville Arts Council. He’s been teaching for twenty-five years and currently teaches creative writing classes at Brookline High School. He lives in the Boston area with his wife and two daughters.
