ORIGAMI
The kids are good at this. Their nimble fingers
Double and fold and double fold the pages,
Making mimetic icons for all ages.
The floor of the school is littered with dead ringers:
Songbirds that really flap their wings, rare cranes,
Bleached bonsai trees, pale ghouls, two kinds of hats,
Dwarf stars, white roses, Persian copycats.
Small packet boats, whole fleets of flyable planes.
Some of the girls, some of the older ones,
Make effigies of boys and…”Goodness sakes!”
They ask what I can make. “I make mistakes.”
“No, really, Mr. Greg!” They don’t like puns.
I tear out a page and say, “I’ve made a bed.”
They frown at me. I’ll have to lie on it.
“See, it’s a sheet.” But they’re not buying it,
And seem to imply (“You’re crazy!”) it’s all in my head.
I head for home, where even more white lies
Take shape. The page is a window filled with frost,
As unformed thought, a thought I had, but lost.
The page is the sclera of someone rolling his eyes
As it becomes (you’ll recognize the trick)
Tomorrow morning, laundry on the line,
The South Pole, circa 1929,
The mainsail of the Pequod, Moby Dick,
The desert sand, the shore, the arctic waste
Of untold tales, where hero and author together
Must turn, out of the silence, into the whether-
Or-not-they-find-the-grail. Not to your taste?
The page is a flag of surrender. I surrender
To the rustle of programs before a serious talk,
The sound of seashells, seas, the taste of chalk,
The ghost of snow, the ghost of the sky in December,
And frozen surfaces of ponds, which hide
Some frigid stirring, something. (What have I done?)
It’s the napkin at a table set for one,
The shade drawn in a room where someone died.
The pages keep on turning. They assume
More shapes than I can put my fingers on.
A wall of silence, curtains, doors, false dawn,
The stared-at ceiling of my rented room.
“You crazy, Mr. Greg.” The voices call;
the sheet on the unmade bed is gone awry.
I sit at my little desk in mid-July,
Throwing snowballs at the Sheetrock wall.
---Greg Williamson
Greg Williamson’s Origami
One of the exercises I used to give my students was to summarize a whole poem into a single sentence. It’s a bear of an assignment, but it forces you to read, think, analyze, and then take the product of your thoughts and filter it into a strong and brief statement. It didn’t matter if the student was looking at one of their own poems or one of Shakespeare’s, this assignment shocked the hell out of them. They figured that one sentence would be a piece of cake. They’d read the poem once, then write a one-line summary and they’d be done. As Lee Corso says, Not So Fast, My Friends. With an assignment like this, requiring an economical use of words, the expectations are high and the margin for error is slim. All of this talk about what I’ve come to call the Smushed Poem Assignment has me motivated to try it today. Let’s take a look at Greg Williamson’s wildly creative Origami and hopefully by the end of our examination I’ll have a good solid sentence for the poem.
You’ve heard countless phrases about first impressions so I won’t dare giving you another, but I will ask you this: what’s the first thing you noticed as you read this poem? If you’re a smart ass then you’re chomping at the bit to tell me you noticed the title first. That’s not what I had in mind. The detailed descriptions of the kids creating their origami creatures and items are well written in the first few stanzas, but almost immediately I noticed the rhyme scheme. The rhymes are nearly perfect throughout the poem and quite often they are end stopped. This is a recipe for formulaic and metered verse that might drift off into the droll of Old English drinking songs and nursery rhymes. But Greg Williamson avoids the fate of conventional rhyme schemes by balancing the rhymes with a healthy blend of varied images, lively characters, and fresh, true dialogue. These features are very difficult to pull off in a poem that is constructed with a rhyme scheme, yet when they fit a poem organically they propel the reader through the poem.
Combining the poem’s title with the first stanza, Williamson wastes no time giving readers the necessary particulars to immerse themselves in the poem’s world. There are a group of children folding the paper to make origami figures. Paper litters the floor from failed attempts and some stirring successes. Williamson devotes the whole second stanza to providing a great list of the imaginative things the kids have created. We find ourselves endeared to Williamson for the way he treats the failed attempts as something unique, and thus a masterpiece in its own right:
Songbirds that really flap their wings, rare cranes,
Bleached bonsai trees, pale ghouls, two kinds of hats,
Dwarf stars, white roses, Persian copycats.
Small packet boats, whole fleets of flyable planes.
In the next two stanzas Williamson introduces dialogue in the form of a short interchange between himself and some of the children. His answers are witty and self-deprecating, the type of thing an audience might love. “They ask what I can make. ‘I make mistakes.’ / ‘No, really, Mr. Greg!’ They don’t like puns.” Letting his mind do the work, as opposed to his hands, Williamson responds to the children’s prodding by ripping loose a single sheet of paper. He holds it before them and says “I’ve made a bed.” If they didn’t like his line about making mistakes then it should come as no surprise that Williamson is greeted with frowns. It doesn’t bother him though; he resolves to take this “bed” he’s made and “lie on it.” With one last attempt he says to the kids “See, it’s a sheet. But they’re not buying it, / And seem to imply (“You’re crazy!”) it’s all in my head.” This will be an important link to the rest of the poem, a point of departure into Williamson’s constantly churning imagination.
We often think of children as possessing untouched and limitless minds, but in this poem it appears to be Mr. Greg who is tapped into a steady stream-of-consciousness. After working with the children, our speaker returns home where “even more white lies.” He won’t be folding this white to resemble a spear or a one-legged crane, but he will be laboring just as hard to get words onto the page. The blank page is daunting; he sees it as a “window filled with frost, / As unformed thought, a thought I had, but lost.” And this is where he begins to pick up steam, next the page is someone rolling their eyes, which seamlessly shifts into “Tomorrow morning, laundry on the line, / The South Pole, circa 1929, / The mainsail of the Pequod, Moby Dick.” Are you beginning to see what I mean about stream-of-consciousness? One image segues into the next, sometimes with strong connections, while others are lucky to have a mere flicker of similarity. Realizing that it might be a little difficult and disorienting at first for readers, Williamson gives us a small bit of encouragement, telling us “you’ll recognize the trick.” The writing style keeps readers swimming within their minds, trying to keep up with the poem’s path, but boy is it fun, nearly as much fun as the children seemed to be having with their origami earlier in the poem. Dare I say Williamson is crafting poetic origami in this poem.
One of the things that differentiates this poem from others that are swept up with the creative spirit is how Williamson is caring and attentive to his readers. We just made note of his aside to readers that they’ll recognize his trick and how he constructs his links of images, but he also tries to give us variety to appeal to a wider audience. As the poem moves into a realm “Of untold tales, where hero and author together / Must turn, out of the silence, into the whether- / Or-not-they-find-the-grail,” Williamson quickly follows this up with a question to his readers: “Not to your taste?” This allows him to make an abrupt turn and pull back in the readers he might have been losing. He takes the poem more introspective with the white page as his surrender, as “the napkin at a table set for one, / The shade drawn in a room where someone died.” Ultimately, it is not surrender that overcomes Williamson, but a sense of the awesome depth of imagination. He acknowledges the pages and their images “assume / more shapes than I can put my fingers on.” There exist an infinite web of connections within the world, all waiting for a writer to pluck them free and toss them onto the page. When this happens then “the pages keep on turning.” We’ve been in the outer limits of Williamson’s wide open mind, but the journey is coming to an end, returning to his own house where all of this thought originates from: “The stared-at ceiling of my rented room” where he hears again “You crazy, Mr. Greg” as he notices “the sheet on the unmade bed is gone awry.” His day¾events, words, thoughts, gestures¾is stringing itself together like hands reaching out to each other to be held. With these forces pulling together, with this wonderful synergy, Williamson sits down at his “ little desk in mid-July, / Throwing snowballs at the Sheetrock wall.” He is ready to dismantle impossibilities, he is juiced with creativity.
Having reached the end of our deep reading of the poem and having originally promised a tightly constructed and well thought out sentence to summarize the poem, here is my best effort (it’s a little long winded :)) to fulfill that most difficult assignment: The genius of creativity is that it follows no rules except for those that you create, and even those are your personal sense of how best to coax awareness so that in seeing a sheet of paper you look beyond its physical form and see ten thousand things no one else could spot.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
How It Is - Maxine Kumin
HOW IT IS
Shall I say how it is in your clothes?
A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.
The dog at the center of my life recognizes
you've come to visit, he's ecstatic.
In the left pocket, a hole.
In the right, a parking ticket
delivered up last August on Bay State Road.
In my heart, a scatter like milkweed,
a flinging from the pods of the soul.
My skin presses your old outline.
It is hot and dry inside.
I think of the last day of your life,
old friend, how I would unwind it, paste
it together in a different collage,
back from the death car idling in the garage,
back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced,
reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish
into a ceremony of sandwich,
running the home movie backward to a space
we could be easy in, a kitchen place
with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.
Dear friend, you have excited crowds
with your example. They swell
like wine bags, straining at your seams.
I will be years gathering up our words,
fishing out letters, snapshots, stains,
leaning my ribs against this durable cloth
to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.
---Maxine Kumin
Maxine Kumin's How It Is
Desperation—which at its base is fear—motivates us to do things we normally wouldn't even consider. Rational thought scurries away like a child's ball disappearing down a street sewer. Limits shrink and everything is possible...at a cost. In Maxine Kumin's How It Is the cost has already been charged and the poem's speaker, unhinged by grief, is desperate to revisit a recently deceased friend. The sorrow and longing are so intense that she resorts to trying on her friend's clothes. We do strange things when we lose someone we love, but they're not strange within that moment. These desperate acts are what we have at our disposal; they may not bring our loved ones back, but on some level we gain comfort—and if we're very fortunate—understanding.
There's no beating around the bush in this poem; Kumin makes sure we know the path she'll follow with a definitive first line: “Shall I say how it is in your clothes? / A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.” Eerie and indeed desperate, the poem's speaker puts herself into her friend's physical confines as a means of conjuring her, or at least a fleeting connection. When the speaker's dog recognizes these clothes and grows “ecstatic” we see his enthusiasm as innocent and lively—the exact emotions our speaker lacks. The nuances of life—“In the left pocket, a hole. / In the right, a parking ticket”—may appear minuscule, but they startle us out of our grief with pressures of reality. Before moving forward, Kumin is sensitive to her heart, feeling “a scatter like milkweed, / a flinging from the pods of the soul.” This grief will not go gently and so she pushes herself with the untamed fuel of desperation. “My skin presses your old outline. / It is hot and dry inside.” Kumin describes the action with the emotionless precision of a scientist writing a lab report.
After one stanza of trying on her friend's clothes, and essentially trying on her former life, our speaker unravels more of the intricacies of her friend's life. She starts with her final day, thinking “how I would unwind it, paste / it together in a different collage.” As counterintuitive as it might seem to soften death, which normally is as malleable as cement, Kumin slices scenes from her friend's final day as if they are warm slices of pie. This way she is able to create art in dying. Her friend doesn't end in “the death car,” but starts with it “idling in the garage.” Her “praying hands unlaced” find themselves put back to work “reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish / into a ceremony of sandwich.” The good parts of life return in “a space / we could be easy in, a kitchen place / with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.” Never has there been a more fitting adjective than “living;” just as meat is the dead flesh of an animal taken in by humans for sustenance, it provides new life to Maxine Kumin. Undoubtedly what she finds is not real life, but remember that Kumin is desperate for any more time with her friend, any at all.
By the time we reach the final stanza Maxine Kumin has gone to great lengths to measure how life was for her friend. With this fresh knowledge, she presses on with a message for her deceased friend—a gritty tribute born out of experience. Kumin declares “Dear friend, you have excited crowds / with your example.” Because of their friendship, Kumin knows “I will be years gathering up our words, / fishing out letters, snapshots, stains.” Their time together has left her with an immense collection of emotion, a mansion of moments that she'll explore for the rest of her life. If these treasures aren't enough to stir her memories to vividness, we already know that she is not afraid of desperation. If all else fails we can expect to find Maxine Kumin “leaning my ribs against this durable cloth / to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.” Who can blame her? To have one more moment with a lost loved one nothing seems outlandish or crazy; desperation actually seems sane.
Shall I say how it is in your clothes?
A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.
The dog at the center of my life recognizes
you've come to visit, he's ecstatic.
In the left pocket, a hole.
In the right, a parking ticket
delivered up last August on Bay State Road.
In my heart, a scatter like milkweed,
a flinging from the pods of the soul.
My skin presses your old outline.
It is hot and dry inside.
I think of the last day of your life,
old friend, how I would unwind it, paste
it together in a different collage,
back from the death car idling in the garage,
back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced,
reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish
into a ceremony of sandwich,
running the home movie backward to a space
we could be easy in, a kitchen place
with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.
Dear friend, you have excited crowds
with your example. They swell
like wine bags, straining at your seams.
I will be years gathering up our words,
fishing out letters, snapshots, stains,
leaning my ribs against this durable cloth
to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.
---Maxine Kumin
Maxine Kumin's How It Is
Desperation—which at its base is fear—motivates us to do things we normally wouldn't even consider. Rational thought scurries away like a child's ball disappearing down a street sewer. Limits shrink and everything is possible...at a cost. In Maxine Kumin's How It Is the cost has already been charged and the poem's speaker, unhinged by grief, is desperate to revisit a recently deceased friend. The sorrow and longing are so intense that she resorts to trying on her friend's clothes. We do strange things when we lose someone we love, but they're not strange within that moment. These desperate acts are what we have at our disposal; they may not bring our loved ones back, but on some level we gain comfort—and if we're very fortunate—understanding.
There's no beating around the bush in this poem; Kumin makes sure we know the path she'll follow with a definitive first line: “Shall I say how it is in your clothes? / A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.” Eerie and indeed desperate, the poem's speaker puts herself into her friend's physical confines as a means of conjuring her, or at least a fleeting connection. When the speaker's dog recognizes these clothes and grows “ecstatic” we see his enthusiasm as innocent and lively—the exact emotions our speaker lacks. The nuances of life—“In the left pocket, a hole. / In the right, a parking ticket”—may appear minuscule, but they startle us out of our grief with pressures of reality. Before moving forward, Kumin is sensitive to her heart, feeling “a scatter like milkweed, / a flinging from the pods of the soul.” This grief will not go gently and so she pushes herself with the untamed fuel of desperation. “My skin presses your old outline. / It is hot and dry inside.” Kumin describes the action with the emotionless precision of a scientist writing a lab report.
After one stanza of trying on her friend's clothes, and essentially trying on her former life, our speaker unravels more of the intricacies of her friend's life. She starts with her final day, thinking “how I would unwind it, paste / it together in a different collage.” As counterintuitive as it might seem to soften death, which normally is as malleable as cement, Kumin slices scenes from her friend's final day as if they are warm slices of pie. This way she is able to create art in dying. Her friend doesn't end in “the death car,” but starts with it “idling in the garage.” Her “praying hands unlaced” find themselves put back to work “reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish / into a ceremony of sandwich.” The good parts of life return in “a space / we could be easy in, a kitchen place / with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.” Never has there been a more fitting adjective than “living;” just as meat is the dead flesh of an animal taken in by humans for sustenance, it provides new life to Maxine Kumin. Undoubtedly what she finds is not real life, but remember that Kumin is desperate for any more time with her friend, any at all.
By the time we reach the final stanza Maxine Kumin has gone to great lengths to measure how life was for her friend. With this fresh knowledge, she presses on with a message for her deceased friend—a gritty tribute born out of experience. Kumin declares “Dear friend, you have excited crowds / with your example.” Because of their friendship, Kumin knows “I will be years gathering up our words, / fishing out letters, snapshots, stains.” Their time together has left her with an immense collection of emotion, a mansion of moments that she'll explore for the rest of her life. If these treasures aren't enough to stir her memories to vividness, we already know that she is not afraid of desperation. If all else fails we can expect to find Maxine Kumin “leaning my ribs against this durable cloth / to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.” Who can blame her? To have one more moment with a lost loved one nothing seems outlandish or crazy; desperation actually seems sane.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
To Be In Love - Gwendolyn Brooks
TO BE IN LOVE
To be in love
Is to touch things with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well.
You look at things
Through his eyes.
A cardinal is red.
A sky is blue.
Suddenly you know he knows too.
He is not there but
You know you are tasting together
The winter, or light spring weather.
His hand to take your hand is overmuch.
Too much to bear.
You cannot look in his eyes
Because your pulse must not say
What must not be said.
When he
Shuts a door—
Is not there—
Your arms are water.
And you are free
With a ghastly freedom.
You are the beautiful half
Of a golden hurt.
You remember and covet his mouth,
To touch, to whisper on.
Oh when to declare
Is certain Death!
Oh when to apprize,
Is to mesmerize,
To see fall down, the Column of Gold,
Into the commonest ash.
---Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks' To Be In Love
Working against our expectations is one of the more devious and creative paths a poem, or for that matter any piece of art, can follow. We believe, and because of those beliefs, formed out of our experiences, when a situation arises with familiar circumstances and characteristics we know what will happen next. But when our expectations are shattered, when our truths melt like chocolate on a hot day, we are lost. Uncomfortable and distressing, in these moments we are put in a position to learn a great deal about ourselves. This is the practical side of surprise, taking the suspense and mystery and melding it into a significant lesson. Gwendolyn Brooks gives us a chance to learn about ourselves with her unusual poem To Be In Love.
“To be in love / Is to touch things with a lighter hand.” Brooks begins the poem with this beautiful couplet. It's a simple way of describing the euphoric state of being in love, and yet it fits. A softer, gentler touch allows for more sensation, a deeper feeling. Being in love brings about this growth: “In yourself you stretch, you are well.” It changes you in a profound way—you become a better version of yourself, more in tune to the world because looking after the happiness of another person has become your lifework. It is your masterpiece. “You look at things / Through his eyes.” Brooks presents a proactive view of being in love, a view that looses us from the confines of our own bodies and allows us inside the intimate sections of our loved one's mind and soul. The sustainability of this connection seems natural and without fail. “He is not there but / You know you are tasting together.” Of course we will have impediments separating us from those that we love, but because we are in love we share a connection that can travel the distance that separates us. We expect that love harbors and fosters these uber positive conceptions. As Gwendolyn Brooks delineates poetically the virtues of being in love, we read and nod along. We remember our own unrivaled highs of being in love. This is how she establishes the grounds for surprise. This is how the first act is written and ends.
Surely if I gave you a choice you would choose love over loss. As we revel in the delights of being in love we are a breeze, a footstep, a mere hiccup from the hellacious lows of losing it all. What once was special and gave us goosebumps will just as soon be the most painful memory, keeping us awake at night, morphing us into a version of ourselves we don't like and can't control. “His hand to take your hand is overmuch. / Too much to bear.” Brooks catapults us between the natural landscape of love and loss with a seamlessness that is a testament to her velvety smooth poetry. But even as her poetry itself is smooth, the subject matter is rife with bumps on our way down to the lowest point. Life is difficult in the shadows of love. Brooks warns us “You cannot look in his eyes / Because your pulse must not say / What must not be said.” Grown of pride, this declaration focuses on the body's ability to betray the heart. It could be something as simple as a lifted eyebrow, a forced smile, or a slow gulp for air. These are enough to say, in body language, what pride prohibits us from saying; we must not give any satisfaction to the source of our pain. It is macho (although not limited to men), it is stupid, and it is unavoidable. And to think just moments ago we knew the joyous nature of being in love. And to think we thought we were reading a poem about love and being touched “with a lighter hand.” Now, “When he / Shuts a door— / Is not there— / Your arms are water.” Just as love loosed us and allowed us inside the mind of the one we love, we are also loosed when love deserts us—our body, including our heart, exists beyond our control.
So what comes next? After highs and lows how do we rebound to a normal existence? Stuck within an emotional turbulence that we helped create, we “are free / with a ghastly freedom.” In this moment of the poem we are a millennium from the opening lines that laid out the beauty of being in love like a warm quilt covering our whole body on a snowy night. When Gwendolyn Brooks gave us the chance to be in love we took it, assuming and expecting it would be romantic. We didn't take into account the terrible aftermath of loss and the stages of love that none of us want to travel. Suddenly, we “are the beautiful half / Of a golden hurt.” My eyes fill with tears and my heart slows to its gentlest beating when I read that line. It touches me like few others I've ever read and it remains with me like those inexplicably persistent random memories from childhood. I'm overcome by the line's duality: soul-altering beauty and mind-shattering pain. Are we to “remember and covet his mouth, / to touch, to whisper on,” if doing so will blanket every millimeter of our bodies with dread? In that moment of utmost pain we very well might wish our pain out of existence, saying I wish this had never happened. I wish I'd never been in love. Once again we prove how foolish and prone to emotional swells we are. These words are not a spell reversing time, cleansing our hurt, and restoring our deep wounds to before they knew such sorrow. What these words represent is the ultimate lesson embedded in the middle of surprise: we admit defeat by love and that we want no more of it, still we live on in search of love. The process will begin for each of us again. This is an expectation, not a myth; not the “Column of Gold” but the “commonest ash.” Made of what is common, we earn and savor the touches of gold that come our way.
To be in love
Is to touch things with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well.
You look at things
Through his eyes.
A cardinal is red.
A sky is blue.
Suddenly you know he knows too.
He is not there but
You know you are tasting together
The winter, or light spring weather.
His hand to take your hand is overmuch.
Too much to bear.
You cannot look in his eyes
Because your pulse must not say
What must not be said.
When he
Shuts a door—
Is not there—
Your arms are water.
And you are free
With a ghastly freedom.
You are the beautiful half
Of a golden hurt.
You remember and covet his mouth,
To touch, to whisper on.
Oh when to declare
Is certain Death!
Oh when to apprize,
Is to mesmerize,
To see fall down, the Column of Gold,
Into the commonest ash.
---Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks' To Be In Love
Working against our expectations is one of the more devious and creative paths a poem, or for that matter any piece of art, can follow. We believe, and because of those beliefs, formed out of our experiences, when a situation arises with familiar circumstances and characteristics we know what will happen next. But when our expectations are shattered, when our truths melt like chocolate on a hot day, we are lost. Uncomfortable and distressing, in these moments we are put in a position to learn a great deal about ourselves. This is the practical side of surprise, taking the suspense and mystery and melding it into a significant lesson. Gwendolyn Brooks gives us a chance to learn about ourselves with her unusual poem To Be In Love.
“To be in love / Is to touch things with a lighter hand.” Brooks begins the poem with this beautiful couplet. It's a simple way of describing the euphoric state of being in love, and yet it fits. A softer, gentler touch allows for more sensation, a deeper feeling. Being in love brings about this growth: “In yourself you stretch, you are well.” It changes you in a profound way—you become a better version of yourself, more in tune to the world because looking after the happiness of another person has become your lifework. It is your masterpiece. “You look at things / Through his eyes.” Brooks presents a proactive view of being in love, a view that looses us from the confines of our own bodies and allows us inside the intimate sections of our loved one's mind and soul. The sustainability of this connection seems natural and without fail. “He is not there but / You know you are tasting together.” Of course we will have impediments separating us from those that we love, but because we are in love we share a connection that can travel the distance that separates us. We expect that love harbors and fosters these uber positive conceptions. As Gwendolyn Brooks delineates poetically the virtues of being in love, we read and nod along. We remember our own unrivaled highs of being in love. This is how she establishes the grounds for surprise. This is how the first act is written and ends.
Surely if I gave you a choice you would choose love over loss. As we revel in the delights of being in love we are a breeze, a footstep, a mere hiccup from the hellacious lows of losing it all. What once was special and gave us goosebumps will just as soon be the most painful memory, keeping us awake at night, morphing us into a version of ourselves we don't like and can't control. “His hand to take your hand is overmuch. / Too much to bear.” Brooks catapults us between the natural landscape of love and loss with a seamlessness that is a testament to her velvety smooth poetry. But even as her poetry itself is smooth, the subject matter is rife with bumps on our way down to the lowest point. Life is difficult in the shadows of love. Brooks warns us “You cannot look in his eyes / Because your pulse must not say / What must not be said.” Grown of pride, this declaration focuses on the body's ability to betray the heart. It could be something as simple as a lifted eyebrow, a forced smile, or a slow gulp for air. These are enough to say, in body language, what pride prohibits us from saying; we must not give any satisfaction to the source of our pain. It is macho (although not limited to men), it is stupid, and it is unavoidable. And to think just moments ago we knew the joyous nature of being in love. And to think we thought we were reading a poem about love and being touched “with a lighter hand.” Now, “When he / Shuts a door— / Is not there— / Your arms are water.” Just as love loosed us and allowed us inside the mind of the one we love, we are also loosed when love deserts us—our body, including our heart, exists beyond our control.
So what comes next? After highs and lows how do we rebound to a normal existence? Stuck within an emotional turbulence that we helped create, we “are free / with a ghastly freedom.” In this moment of the poem we are a millennium from the opening lines that laid out the beauty of being in love like a warm quilt covering our whole body on a snowy night. When Gwendolyn Brooks gave us the chance to be in love we took it, assuming and expecting it would be romantic. We didn't take into account the terrible aftermath of loss and the stages of love that none of us want to travel. Suddenly, we “are the beautiful half / Of a golden hurt.” My eyes fill with tears and my heart slows to its gentlest beating when I read that line. It touches me like few others I've ever read and it remains with me like those inexplicably persistent random memories from childhood. I'm overcome by the line's duality: soul-altering beauty and mind-shattering pain. Are we to “remember and covet his mouth, / to touch, to whisper on,” if doing so will blanket every millimeter of our bodies with dread? In that moment of utmost pain we very well might wish our pain out of existence, saying I wish this had never happened. I wish I'd never been in love. Once again we prove how foolish and prone to emotional swells we are. These words are not a spell reversing time, cleansing our hurt, and restoring our deep wounds to before they knew such sorrow. What these words represent is the ultimate lesson embedded in the middle of surprise: we admit defeat by love and that we want no more of it, still we live on in search of love. The process will begin for each of us again. This is an expectation, not a myth; not the “Column of Gold” but the “commonest ash.” Made of what is common, we earn and savor the touches of gold that come our way.
Monday, April 27, 2009
How Things Work - Gary Soto
HOW THINGS WORK
Today it's going to cost us twenty dollars
To live. Five for a softball. Four for a book,
A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,
Bus fare, rosin for your mother's violin.
We're completing our task. The tip I left
For the waitress filters down
Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child
Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won't let go
Of a balled sock until there's chicken to eat.
As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:
You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
Is thrown into their faces.
If we buy goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.
A tip, a small purchase here and there,
And things just keep going. I guess.
--- Gary Soto
Gary Soto's How Things Work:
We have control over our attitudes, over how we approach each day, over how we interact with others, over how we exercise our minds and bodies. Certainly, we have some mechanisms of control in our lives, but these pale in comparison to the large bulk of unknowns each of us encounters. We don't have control over the price of milk or which way the tides roll. We can't control when the sun rises or when we will receive a letter from a friend. These, and many other, surprises appear in our lives and we must adapt. The adaptability of human beings is fairly underrated. Yes, we've all heard about how we resist change, but if we absolutely must make changes then we do it. The smoothness of these transitions are attributable to analytical skills. If we can see the bigger picture then we just might understand why changes need to be made and why we must be flexible. Gary Soto flexes these all-powerful analytical skills in his poem How Things Work, explaining to his daughter (and all of us readers) how the economy works on a very personal level. Thankfully Soto doesn't bog down in a detailed cost-benefit analysis or burden us with high economic jargon; he goes to the root of our human interactions with money, the necessities for survival and the items that make life livable.
From the very first line, Soto's tone is very matter-of-fact and confident in the poem's subject matter. “Today it's going to cost us twenty dollars / To live.” The items are compiled into a random list with their price tags trailing behind the poetic string of images. Taking the list as a whole—a softball, a book,coffee, sweet rolls, bus fare, rosin for his mother's violin— Soto gives us a rounded picture of who he is a person. It might not be fair, but we can draw certain assumptions based upon the purchases that someone makes. Soto avoids this venue for social debate and sticks within the confines of his poem. This is not to say that later in the poem Soto won't make a clear and powerful argument on socio-economic issues. For now, Soto keeps on track, simply stating “We're completing our task.” Still, Soto demonstrates how completing our tasks has unavoidable and far-reaching impacts. “The tip I left / For the waitress filters down / Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child.” In showing our inter-connectedness, Soto blends poetry with political thought, but unlike some blatant, in-your-face poems Soto's How Things Work is natural. Nothing in this poem seems forced or for effect and for that simple reason I've grown to love this poem.
How Things Work has one clear shift, coming near the poem's middle section. When Soto directly addresses his daughter, he makes readers privy to the reason that he cares about issues much larger than himself. He is not overbearing in his interpretation, instead telling his daughter and readers “As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this.” There's an acknowledgement in that statement that the upcoming ideas are based upon Soto's own experiences and, thus, could be limited. Even so, he doesn't lose much in self-assuredness, moving forward with his poetic-economic theory:
You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
Is thrown into their faces.
It makes perfect sense! See, poetry can explain even the most complex topics. I'm getting fired up right now just thinking about the other things poetry could explain and the problems poetry could solve. With poetry we have the control to break down the mysteries of the universe. All right, I might be getting a little carried away.
Soto's zig-zagging path of money takes us through indelible images, ending on a strangely aggressive movie where “laughter / Is thrown into their faces.” This is the one image in this poem that I struggle with. Is this a critique of modern, popular entertainment and it's skewed focus on poor people? Rather than answer that question I'll provide an alternate view: I'm reading too much into this image. The laughter could very well be thrown in their faces because the movie has a cheesy laugh track and doesn't allow viewers their own freedom to decide when they want to laugh. The forced laughter is not the poem's endpoint. Soto provides a few more examples of his poetic-economic theory: “If we buy goldfish, someone tries on a hat. / If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.” We cannot escape our connection with the well-being of our neighbors here and halfway around the world. I considered highlighting this poem earlier this month in my blog because it seemed apt with the state of our local, national, and global economy. I chose to save How Things Work for the end of the month because it provides a positive message in showing how simple and human our problems and solutions are. We hear commentators use large words about the economic meltdown and we hear them debate the merits of varying levels of bailouts. The words these knowledgeable and intelligent people use are nuanced to economic theory, they are designed to prescribe the climate within our economy, yet they serve to exclude, confuse, and complicate matters. Gary Soto has a large vocabulary and he very easily could have exercised it in How Things Work, but he didn't. He used control and restraint to achieve a bigger impact by reaching the largest audience possible. That's not to say he doesn't dazzle us with masterful poetic skill in this poem. Gary Soto uses poetry to explain how things work, to explain that ultimately “things just keep going. I guess.”
Today it's going to cost us twenty dollars
To live. Five for a softball. Four for a book,
A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,
Bus fare, rosin for your mother's violin.
We're completing our task. The tip I left
For the waitress filters down
Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child
Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won't let go
Of a balled sock until there's chicken to eat.
As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:
You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
Is thrown into their faces.
If we buy goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.
A tip, a small purchase here and there,
And things just keep going. I guess.
--- Gary Soto
Gary Soto's How Things Work:
We have control over our attitudes, over how we approach each day, over how we interact with others, over how we exercise our minds and bodies. Certainly, we have some mechanisms of control in our lives, but these pale in comparison to the large bulk of unknowns each of us encounters. We don't have control over the price of milk or which way the tides roll. We can't control when the sun rises or when we will receive a letter from a friend. These, and many other, surprises appear in our lives and we must adapt. The adaptability of human beings is fairly underrated. Yes, we've all heard about how we resist change, but if we absolutely must make changes then we do it. The smoothness of these transitions are attributable to analytical skills. If we can see the bigger picture then we just might understand why changes need to be made and why we must be flexible. Gary Soto flexes these all-powerful analytical skills in his poem How Things Work, explaining to his daughter (and all of us readers) how the economy works on a very personal level. Thankfully Soto doesn't bog down in a detailed cost-benefit analysis or burden us with high economic jargon; he goes to the root of our human interactions with money, the necessities for survival and the items that make life livable.
From the very first line, Soto's tone is very matter-of-fact and confident in the poem's subject matter. “Today it's going to cost us twenty dollars / To live.” The items are compiled into a random list with their price tags trailing behind the poetic string of images. Taking the list as a whole—a softball, a book,coffee, sweet rolls, bus fare, rosin for his mother's violin— Soto gives us a rounded picture of who he is a person. It might not be fair, but we can draw certain assumptions based upon the purchases that someone makes. Soto avoids this venue for social debate and sticks within the confines of his poem. This is not to say that later in the poem Soto won't make a clear and powerful argument on socio-economic issues. For now, Soto keeps on track, simply stating “We're completing our task.” Still, Soto demonstrates how completing our tasks has unavoidable and far-reaching impacts. “The tip I left / For the waitress filters down / Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child.” In showing our inter-connectedness, Soto blends poetry with political thought, but unlike some blatant, in-your-face poems Soto's How Things Work is natural. Nothing in this poem seems forced or for effect and for that simple reason I've grown to love this poem.
How Things Work has one clear shift, coming near the poem's middle section. When Soto directly addresses his daughter, he makes readers privy to the reason that he cares about issues much larger than himself. He is not overbearing in his interpretation, instead telling his daughter and readers “As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this.” There's an acknowledgement in that statement that the upcoming ideas are based upon Soto's own experiences and, thus, could be limited. Even so, he doesn't lose much in self-assuredness, moving forward with his poetic-economic theory:
You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
Is thrown into their faces.
It makes perfect sense! See, poetry can explain even the most complex topics. I'm getting fired up right now just thinking about the other things poetry could explain and the problems poetry could solve. With poetry we have the control to break down the mysteries of the universe. All right, I might be getting a little carried away.
Soto's zig-zagging path of money takes us through indelible images, ending on a strangely aggressive movie where “laughter / Is thrown into their faces.” This is the one image in this poem that I struggle with. Is this a critique of modern, popular entertainment and it's skewed focus on poor people? Rather than answer that question I'll provide an alternate view: I'm reading too much into this image. The laughter could very well be thrown in their faces because the movie has a cheesy laugh track and doesn't allow viewers their own freedom to decide when they want to laugh. The forced laughter is not the poem's endpoint. Soto provides a few more examples of his poetic-economic theory: “If we buy goldfish, someone tries on a hat. / If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.” We cannot escape our connection with the well-being of our neighbors here and halfway around the world. I considered highlighting this poem earlier this month in my blog because it seemed apt with the state of our local, national, and global economy. I chose to save How Things Work for the end of the month because it provides a positive message in showing how simple and human our problems and solutions are. We hear commentators use large words about the economic meltdown and we hear them debate the merits of varying levels of bailouts. The words these knowledgeable and intelligent people use are nuanced to economic theory, they are designed to prescribe the climate within our economy, yet they serve to exclude, confuse, and complicate matters. Gary Soto has a large vocabulary and he very easily could have exercised it in How Things Work, but he didn't. He used control and restraint to achieve a bigger impact by reaching the largest audience possible. That's not to say he doesn't dazzle us with masterful poetic skill in this poem. Gary Soto uses poetry to explain how things work, to explain that ultimately “things just keep going. I guess.”
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Eating Together - Li-Young Lee
EATING TOGETHER
In the steamer is the trout
seasoned with slivers of ginger,
two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.
We shall eat it with rice for lunch,
brothers, sister, my mother who will
taste the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago. Then he lay down
to sleep like a snow-covered road
winding through pines older than him,
without any travelers, and lonely for no one.
---Li-Young Lee
Li-Young Lee's Eating Together
I find it interesting to look at this poem with Li-Young Lee's Eating Alone. They are clearly different poems, and yet I feel, in some ways, they serve as companion pieces. We get the struggle of loneliness and loss full force in Eating Alone, while Eating Together has slivers of compassion and the family dynamic. Strangely enough, Eating Together is the poem that proves the necessity of sharing meals with others; the family gathers to eat in the aftermath of losing their patriarch. Lee's father, who we already know a good deal about from Eating Alone, makes more than a ghostly cameo in this poem. He is the powerful figure influencing their dining habits even after he's left the earth. That's a sure sign of someone who has left an impact!
“In the steamer is the trout / seasoned with slivers of ginger, / two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil. / We shall eat it with rice for lunch.” Well okay, Li-Young Lee has me hungry, anyone else? It's a straightforward description of a delicious meal. In reading these lines I can sense the precision in the food preparation. The exact number of sprigs of green onions, the carefully sliced slivers of ginger, the washed and cleaned trout. I also enjoy how Lee strongly calls us to the table: “We shall eat it with rice for lunch.” It's matter-of-fact and invites no questions, almost a father would say to his picky children. And who is being called to lunch? “Brothers, sister, my mother who will / taste the sweetest meat of the head.” Lee doesn't use fanciful adjectives or drawn-out phrases, but he still supplies readers with a clear picture of his family. We know there are a good amount of men in the family, as well as a lone sister. We know the hierarchy of the family, with the mother finding the sweetest meat, the most prized part of the meal, on her plate. And when she eats this meat the poem's hidden subject is revealed: her husband, the children's recently deceased father.
It is in the way that the mother eats her food that she invokes memories of her husband. “Holding it between her fingers / deftly, the way my father did / weeks ago.” Some people say that over time husbands and wives start to dress alike and they even start to look alike; maybe they start to eat alike as well. Lee has already shown us in his other poems that the littlest things can trigger much grander memories. His mother's eating habits are the launching pad for confronting the reality of the situation. They are gathered, as a family, to share a meal for one of the first times without an integral member of their family. In his absence they see his immense impact on themselves. Lee is careful not to go down that sentimental road, instead he steers the poem directly toward the father and away from his surviving family members. When Lee writes, “Then he lay down / to sleep like a snow-covered road / winding through pines older than him, / without any travelers, and lonely for no one,” he is giving his father a poetic burial, a eulogy that guides him through peaceful images to a final resting place. Certainly it is heartbreaking, and yet I can't help but see the blatant love in these lines. It is a love that sprouts from simple roots, just as the food they are sitting down to eat arrived on their plates. And this love was fostered in moments like the one they are sharing in this poem: all of them gathered together to eat and talk, to capture their days and commemorate the people and times they have lost.
In the steamer is the trout
seasoned with slivers of ginger,
two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.
We shall eat it with rice for lunch,
brothers, sister, my mother who will
taste the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago. Then he lay down
to sleep like a snow-covered road
winding through pines older than him,
without any travelers, and lonely for no one.
---Li-Young Lee
Li-Young Lee's Eating Together
I find it interesting to look at this poem with Li-Young Lee's Eating Alone. They are clearly different poems, and yet I feel, in some ways, they serve as companion pieces. We get the struggle of loneliness and loss full force in Eating Alone, while Eating Together has slivers of compassion and the family dynamic. Strangely enough, Eating Together is the poem that proves the necessity of sharing meals with others; the family gathers to eat in the aftermath of losing their patriarch. Lee's father, who we already know a good deal about from Eating Alone, makes more than a ghostly cameo in this poem. He is the powerful figure influencing their dining habits even after he's left the earth. That's a sure sign of someone who has left an impact!
“In the steamer is the trout / seasoned with slivers of ginger, / two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil. / We shall eat it with rice for lunch.” Well okay, Li-Young Lee has me hungry, anyone else? It's a straightforward description of a delicious meal. In reading these lines I can sense the precision in the food preparation. The exact number of sprigs of green onions, the carefully sliced slivers of ginger, the washed and cleaned trout. I also enjoy how Lee strongly calls us to the table: “We shall eat it with rice for lunch.” It's matter-of-fact and invites no questions, almost a father would say to his picky children. And who is being called to lunch? “Brothers, sister, my mother who will / taste the sweetest meat of the head.” Lee doesn't use fanciful adjectives or drawn-out phrases, but he still supplies readers with a clear picture of his family. We know there are a good amount of men in the family, as well as a lone sister. We know the hierarchy of the family, with the mother finding the sweetest meat, the most prized part of the meal, on her plate. And when she eats this meat the poem's hidden subject is revealed: her husband, the children's recently deceased father.
It is in the way that the mother eats her food that she invokes memories of her husband. “Holding it between her fingers / deftly, the way my father did / weeks ago.” Some people say that over time husbands and wives start to dress alike and they even start to look alike; maybe they start to eat alike as well. Lee has already shown us in his other poems that the littlest things can trigger much grander memories. His mother's eating habits are the launching pad for confronting the reality of the situation. They are gathered, as a family, to share a meal for one of the first times without an integral member of their family. In his absence they see his immense impact on themselves. Lee is careful not to go down that sentimental road, instead he steers the poem directly toward the father and away from his surviving family members. When Lee writes, “Then he lay down / to sleep like a snow-covered road / winding through pines older than him, / without any travelers, and lonely for no one,” he is giving his father a poetic burial, a eulogy that guides him through peaceful images to a final resting place. Certainly it is heartbreaking, and yet I can't help but see the blatant love in these lines. It is a love that sprouts from simple roots, just as the food they are sitting down to eat arrived on their plates. And this love was fostered in moments like the one they are sharing in this poem: all of them gathered together to eat and talk, to capture their days and commemorate the people and times they have lost.
Oops...I missed a day.
This weekend I made an out-of-town-trip. It was fantastic! I thought I had done all the preparation necessary to still post my blog remotely this weekend. Unfortunately, I ran into some technical difficulties that made it nearly impossible for me to post a blog entry on Saturday. As a result I am one day short on my blog entries for the month. To offset this shortcoming I will be posting one more entry on May 1st.
All the best,
Matt
All the best,
Matt
Friday, April 24, 2009
Eating Alone - Li-Young Lee
EATING ALONE
I've pulled the last of the year's young onions.
The garden is bare now. The ground is cold,
brown and old. What is left of the day flames
in the maples at the corner of my
eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.
By the cellar door, I wash the onions,
then drink from the icy metal spigot.
Once, years back, I walked beside my father
among the windfall pears. I can't recall
our words. We may have strolled in silence. But
I still see him bend that way—left hand braced
on knee, creaky—to lift and hold to my
eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet
spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.
It was my father I saw this morning
waving to me from the trees. I almost
called to him, until I came close enough
to see the shovel, leaning where I had
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.
White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas
fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.
What more could I, a young man, want.
---Li-Young Lee
Li-Young Lee's Eating Alone
Sharing meals with others is common practice for humans. So common, in fact, that eating alone carries a stigma of social awkwardness. Look at that guy at a table by himself—he must be lonely. Where is his family, his friends, anyone who knows and cares about him? Why has everyone deserted him? Alright, maybe I'm being a little melodramatic, but there definitely is a tendency to look at someone dining alone and consider that person to be unhappy and worthy of pity. If you can get over the initial weirdness of eating alone—lifting your head and putting down your fork to describe a funny moment from your day, only to realize there's no one there to listen—then you'll come to understand valuable lessons about yourself and life in general. You'll be better calibrated to your natural instincts and the routines that you follow, and in Li-Young Lee's case you'll recognize the ghosts of memory milling about in your life waiting for you to notice them.
Stacked upon each other like stones forming a rough wall, the images in the first stanza are unyielding and cold. “I've pulled the last of the year's young onions. / The garden is bare now.” His hands are in the farewell to the warmth and bounty of the growing season. He ushers this time of the year out with his final act of gardening. There is sorrow and loss in this is goodbye and our speaker seems to be unable to capture the things around him before they slip away. “What is left of the day flames / in the maples at the corner of my / eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.” Lee creates the blink-of-the-eye departure of the cardinal with a speedy and choppy sentence construction. The comma that separates “I turn” and “a cardinal vanishes” acts as a jump cut does in movies and television. The poem's speaker looks for signs of life—the cardinal, the day within the maple tree, the onions—yet when he senses they are with him he tries to acknowledge their presence and in doing so he scares them away.
Moving into memory, the second stanza takes us “years back” to a time when our speaker “walked beside” his father “among the windfall pears.” I must pause and mention how beautiful an image that is: father and young son walking together silently among pears blown from the tree limbs. With these lines, Lee has crafted a very photogenic scene within the poem. It is the father and son's togetherness that matters. Lee “can't recall” if they shared any words, but he does remember his father leaning down “to lift and hold to my / eye a rotten pear.” The little things we commit to memory are fascinating, how they remain in our minds even as we lose large and more traditionally useful pieces of information. This scene stuck with Lee because in the pear his father presented to him “a hornet / spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.” Like Lee at the end of the poem, the hornet was eating alone. He was intoxicated, possibly infuriated, by the pear, a lovely treat to satisfy his base urges.
“It was my father I saw this morning / waving to me from the trees.” We were with Lee in the morning, this was the poem's first stanza. He certainly appeared a little unnerved and spooked, but enough to have seen the ghost of his father? I'm not one for solving poems as if they are old fashioned capers—it's preposterous to believe that you must approach a poem like Sherlock Holmes. Still, I want to examine some of the possibilities in Lee's reflection that he saw him father in the morning. 1. He simply could have seen some thing or things that eerily reminded him of his father and he is taking it a step further to assume his father was with him. 2. His attempts to capture what was slipping away—the day, the cardinal, the remainders of the growing season—was actually an attempt to conjure his father. 3. He looks at the cardinal as his father. Just when he sees the bird it “vanishes.” 4. This one is similar to the first idea, but he is in the same place, same time of the year where he walked with his father and he can't escape his father's presence, feeling it still resides here and inside Lee. A fifth and final explanation comes later in the third stanza itself. “I almost / called to him, until I came close enough / to see the shovel, leaning where I had / left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.” Lee's father could have been a mirage; from afar Lee saw the shovel against the tree and believed it to be his father. All of these explanations illustrate the depth of emotion that this poem contains. As teachers are known to say, there is no right answer, but we can draw a conclusion: Lee misses his father, most of all when he is farming and eating the fruits of his labor. The tasty list of food that ends the poem is punctuated by a stinging self critique: “And my own loneliness. / What more could I, a young man, want.” Earlier I mentioned the merits of eating alone; Lee has discovered much about himself through eating alone. That doesn't mean he has to be happy with this discovery.
I've pulled the last of the year's young onions.
The garden is bare now. The ground is cold,
brown and old. What is left of the day flames
in the maples at the corner of my
eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.
By the cellar door, I wash the onions,
then drink from the icy metal spigot.
Once, years back, I walked beside my father
among the windfall pears. I can't recall
our words. We may have strolled in silence. But
I still see him bend that way—left hand braced
on knee, creaky—to lift and hold to my
eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet
spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.
It was my father I saw this morning
waving to me from the trees. I almost
called to him, until I came close enough
to see the shovel, leaning where I had
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.
White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas
fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.
What more could I, a young man, want.
---Li-Young Lee
Li-Young Lee's Eating Alone
Sharing meals with others is common practice for humans. So common, in fact, that eating alone carries a stigma of social awkwardness. Look at that guy at a table by himself—he must be lonely. Where is his family, his friends, anyone who knows and cares about him? Why has everyone deserted him? Alright, maybe I'm being a little melodramatic, but there definitely is a tendency to look at someone dining alone and consider that person to be unhappy and worthy of pity. If you can get over the initial weirdness of eating alone—lifting your head and putting down your fork to describe a funny moment from your day, only to realize there's no one there to listen—then you'll come to understand valuable lessons about yourself and life in general. You'll be better calibrated to your natural instincts and the routines that you follow, and in Li-Young Lee's case you'll recognize the ghosts of memory milling about in your life waiting for you to notice them.
Stacked upon each other like stones forming a rough wall, the images in the first stanza are unyielding and cold. “I've pulled the last of the year's young onions. / The garden is bare now.” His hands are in the farewell to the warmth and bounty of the growing season. He ushers this time of the year out with his final act of gardening. There is sorrow and loss in this is goodbye and our speaker seems to be unable to capture the things around him before they slip away. “What is left of the day flames / in the maples at the corner of my / eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.” Lee creates the blink-of-the-eye departure of the cardinal with a speedy and choppy sentence construction. The comma that separates “I turn” and “a cardinal vanishes” acts as a jump cut does in movies and television. The poem's speaker looks for signs of life—the cardinal, the day within the maple tree, the onions—yet when he senses they are with him he tries to acknowledge their presence and in doing so he scares them away.
Moving into memory, the second stanza takes us “years back” to a time when our speaker “walked beside” his father “among the windfall pears.” I must pause and mention how beautiful an image that is: father and young son walking together silently among pears blown from the tree limbs. With these lines, Lee has crafted a very photogenic scene within the poem. It is the father and son's togetherness that matters. Lee “can't recall” if they shared any words, but he does remember his father leaning down “to lift and hold to my / eye a rotten pear.” The little things we commit to memory are fascinating, how they remain in our minds even as we lose large and more traditionally useful pieces of information. This scene stuck with Lee because in the pear his father presented to him “a hornet / spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.” Like Lee at the end of the poem, the hornet was eating alone. He was intoxicated, possibly infuriated, by the pear, a lovely treat to satisfy his base urges.
“It was my father I saw this morning / waving to me from the trees.” We were with Lee in the morning, this was the poem's first stanza. He certainly appeared a little unnerved and spooked, but enough to have seen the ghost of his father? I'm not one for solving poems as if they are old fashioned capers—it's preposterous to believe that you must approach a poem like Sherlock Holmes. Still, I want to examine some of the possibilities in Lee's reflection that he saw him father in the morning. 1. He simply could have seen some thing or things that eerily reminded him of his father and he is taking it a step further to assume his father was with him. 2. His attempts to capture what was slipping away—the day, the cardinal, the remainders of the growing season—was actually an attempt to conjure his father. 3. He looks at the cardinal as his father. Just when he sees the bird it “vanishes.” 4. This one is similar to the first idea, but he is in the same place, same time of the year where he walked with his father and he can't escape his father's presence, feeling it still resides here and inside Lee. A fifth and final explanation comes later in the third stanza itself. “I almost / called to him, until I came close enough / to see the shovel, leaning where I had / left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.” Lee's father could have been a mirage; from afar Lee saw the shovel against the tree and believed it to be his father. All of these explanations illustrate the depth of emotion that this poem contains. As teachers are known to say, there is no right answer, but we can draw a conclusion: Lee misses his father, most of all when he is farming and eating the fruits of his labor. The tasty list of food that ends the poem is punctuated by a stinging self critique: “And my own loneliness. / What more could I, a young man, want.” Earlier I mentioned the merits of eating alone; Lee has discovered much about himself through eating alone. That doesn't mean he has to be happy with this discovery.
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