"Getaway" is three lines long and has no full stop at the end, yet it manages to tell a whole story about leaving. A speaker sets off across water toward "my father's country," and the journey is oddly comic and oddly sad at once. The title promises escape, but nothing in the poem delivers a clean break. The speaker travels in the company of "my tired work," so whatever is being fled comes along as cargo. The central idea seems to be that a getaway is never total: we carry ourselves, our labour and our inheritance with us, in vessels that are barely strong enough for the load.
The first line is the steadiest. "I went by water to my father's country" has eleven syllables and a loose iambic beat, close to the old five-stress line of English verse, with a soft extra syllable on "country." It sounds like the opening of a legend or a ballad, calm and a little formal. The words "water" and "father's" even rhyme faintly in their endings, as if the journey and the destination were already linked in sound. The poem doesn't say whether the "country" is a literal homeland or something more figurative, such as a family temperament, a memory or a trade handed down. That openness is part of its pull. The phrase "my father's country" makes the place belong to someone else, so the speaker is a visitor in it, or an heir.
Then the poem swerves. Line two drops the verbs altogether and becomes a pile of nouns: "crew buttery as lard, paper ship." The grammar goes slack, much like the crew it describes. "Buttery" suggests softness and smoothness, and perhaps people who are well fed and not much use in a storm. Then the simile slides from butter to "lard," which is plainer, greasier and less flattering. It's a small joke about downgrading, and the sticky, slippery sounds make you feel it. Lard is also kitchen and farmhouse material, the sort of thing that belongs in a father's country. The line also contains a hard consonant chain, "crew," "lard," "paper," "ship," which pushes against the softness of "buttery" and gives the line a lurching, bumpy movement.
The "paper ship" is the poem's most suggestive image. Judging by the imagery, it could be a child's folded boat, which would make the voyage a game and also a gamble. It could equally be the page itself, since a poem is a ship made of paper, and the speaker is a writer travelling inside his own words. The poem doesn't confirm that reading, but it's hard to ignore, because the cargo is "me and my tired work," and for a writer, "work" is often the very thing being carried over the water. In that case the getaway is a trick, because the vessel is made from the thing the speaker wants to escape.
"Transport" is the key word. It means to carry, but it also carries an older sense of being swept away by feeling, as in the word "transported." The line holds both ideas: the ship will move the speaker physically, and perhaps it will also lift him out of weariness. Yet the object of the verb is "me and my tired work," with the two joined by "and," as if they weighed the same. "Tired" is a slightly odd word here, since it's the worker who gets tired, not the work. The word moves the exhaustion from the person onto what he makes, so that everything on board seems worn out.
The sound pattern gets plainer as the poem goes on. There is no end rhyme, and the lines shorten from eleven syllables to nine to eight. The last line, "to transport me and my tired work," ends on a heavy "work," and the missing punctuation leaves the voyage unfinished. We never arrive, and we never find out whether the paper holds.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. It combines the old pull of going back to one's origins with a modern, rueful humour about overwork, and it does so in images that are silly and fragile enough to feel true. Escape, it suggests, is a kind of optimistic craft: you fold your ship from whatever paper you have, load your tiredness aboard, and set out anyway.