What We Might Be, What We Are by X. J. Kennedy

What We Might Be, What We Are

by X. J. Kennedy

If you were a scoop of vanilla

And I were the cone where you sat,

If you were a slowly pitched baseball

And I were the swing of the bat,

If you were a shiny new fishhook

And I were a bucket of worms,

If we were a pin and a pincushion,

We might be on intimate terms.

If you were a plate of spaghetti

And I were your piping hot sauce,

We'd not even need to write letters

To put our affection across,

But you're just a piece of red ribbon

In the beard of a Balinese goat

And I'm a New Jersey mosquito.

I guess we'll stay slightly remote.

This poem was published in the book, Exploding Gravy: Poems to Make You Laugh, written by X. J. Kennedy and illustrated by Joy Allen, (Little, Brown, 2002). And lest you sputter and spit that I am sharing a Children's Poem with you (which, btw, I have done before) and that is somehow lesser (really? yeah, NO), I direct you to Kennedy's Wikipedia page, one of many that lists all of his books for all ages and his many awards. Click here.

Let me just start by saying this is not necessarily a children's poem. I see it as a couple of people that will never be an intimate (word used in the poem) in the couple, due to physical distance (need to write letters) as well as their differences (a ribbon and a mosquito). It's a bit heartbreaking if read this way.

But what I truly love are the descriptions and analogies. At first glance, they seem very compatible--ice cream and cone, baseball and bat, fishhook and worms, pin and pincushion, and spaghetti and sauce.

There's a sensual element to all of these, besides the rhyme. Each of these couples are very different from one another. Ice cream can be eaten alone; cones can, but rarely are. You need both a baseball and a bat for a game, but the bat hits the ball. People can and do fish in various ways, but hooks and worms seems the most common; of course, the hook literally penetrates and kills the worm. Pins are stuck into pincushions. Sauce covers spaghetti and really makes a plate of noodles a meal.

So, sure, this is a poem kids can read and love the rhyme and the visual images. We adults can also read it and see a bit more--Kennedy is showing us that these things are compatible but also sometimes not so wonderful together. This layered meaning is often done in things geared towards kids and it is incredibly difficult to pull off--Mary Poppins (1964): there's fun stuff for the kids but also a lot of references and jokes and "wink-wink" stuff that kids won't even notice but are very entertaining for the adults.

The last stanza really demonstrates this pair's differences! The you is not even a goat in Bali--the you is a red ribbon in its beard--dainty, pretty, and exotic. And the speaker is a mosquito--not annoying to ribbons, but very annoying (and sometimes lethal) to humans. Also, a goat in New Jersey--not exotic. "I guess we'll stay slightly remote." Yes. I should say so!

I admit when I first read this, and I keep going back to this, I saw the phyical distance between the two as negligible. I read this as a man in a couple and a woman in another couple who are all friends. The speaker and the you wish they could be together, intimately, but cannot, so they write love letters to one another and stay "slightly remote."

Having read "adult" poems by X. J. Kennedy, I don't think I am reading too much into this. He is often clever and complex in his poems. But maybe this is all just a goof and he writes children's poems to get away from being deep.

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