How it sits among the old mason
jars on some tall and half-forgotten shelf
piled high with remnants of dead skin
waiting for the inevitable touch — every cell
in young bodies yearns to break the rule
unspoken: all belongings belong to the father.
Standing on a three-legged cedar stool
notched with knife strokes for every year,
the boy stretches long and hard into
the future in this same house committed to the woods
watching his few children by peeking through
the door as they sneak rise hope & brood
over the empty space in the dust that still
keeps the shape, the outline of the long stem,
the empty bowl that has now come to be filled
with time and dark flavored tobacco.
The slim
arms rescind as they must, hands full
of the final souvenir of a life’s vision — other
hands may come up empty and keep the rule
of possessions, but pipes are handed down from the father.
Ok, so I am a big dumb idiot theology student, and as such I leap to figure out the meaning of things far too quickly than I ought. Nevertheless, I cannot help myself. Is this a meditation on the fact that a gift that is meant to be given cannot be taken? For me, the lock for which I am keyless remains to be "the final souvenir of a life's vision." I feel like I cannot fully appreciate the poem until I start to come close to understanding this element.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, Drew. Here are a few prefatory remarks that will, I hope, provide a context for what will likely be an inadequate or insufficient response (if you just want my basic response, though, skip down to the last paragraph). First, one criticism of much of my poetry until my most recent work has been that it does not make logical sense line by line. That is, each line does not necessarily logically lead to the following line. This, to me (and in the case of my poetry), is a failing, and it is something I am trying to rectify in my more recent poems. However, I still want most of all to create a sense of meaning by the whole of the poem (that is, I want the reader to come away with a sensation or a feeling) rather than strictly a line-by-line logical meaning. If I can get both, great.
ReplyDeleteSecond, one of the hardest things for a poet to do is to explain his own work. The poet says something in a certain way in his poem because that is the only way he can say it. Does that make sense? For me, the reason for the difficulty of paraphrasing my own poetry is that I strive to achieve a sense of something over and above literal meaning (though, again, I want the latter as well). Also, I think one of the keys to writing a good poem (coming from someone who has published basically nothing) is opening the poet's mind up to the whims of the subconscious. Very often someone will say to me, I like how you referenced X in your poem, and I usually had no idea I had referenced X, but it makes sense that X could have been in the back of my mind somewhere. For instance, in the previous poem on this blog I have the lines "In the summer sun of the open field, I felt the grass..." (I can't remember the line break). That rhythm and diction come directly from Dickey's poem "The Sheep Child." When I wrote it, it just sounded right, but as I reread it, I realized that's where I had gotten it.
All that being said, here's how I think of this poem: it is a coming-of-age poem. For the boy in the poem, the pipe represents... well, exactly what a pipe would represent. I don't want to give any more away for fear of confining the poem to anything more specific than that. I hope it helps.
Ah, the mind of a poet, what a beautiful thing of mystery.
ReplyDeleteI am actually a big fan of attempting to make a creative endeavor greater than the sum of its parts, so I say press on with the holistic model.
Keep 'em coming, broham.