Friday, March 19, 2010
My Father in the Yard
My Father in the Yard
When nothing makes sense, there is raking. Corralling
the fallen into piles, collecting strays; earning your blisters
and backache in pursuit of labor's bone-deep sleep.
Chaos brought to order by a rhythm of persistent toil; crackling
protest drowning out what can't (or won't) be named, (or faced,
or solved). Everything messy gathered and burned.
There's no escape, but there is raking.
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One of my favorite human conditions is the act of cleaning, or creating order in the outside world as a way to feel order internally--particularly when there's a lot of emotional discord hanging around. I love this as an idea...and I think you do too, because it comes up in poems from time to time. And you handle it expertly.
ReplyDeleteAnd you, well, are the queen of the metaphor as onion (LOL but frls): peel away the whole to lines, then the lines to phrases, and the phrases to single words and you have a multitude of understandings from a single poem.
Raking is the perfect metaphor for the inner work one has to do to face demons and change. What is so resonant, uncanny to me are the particular details you focused on to give us a complete and intimate experience of raking 1) as avoiding some ominous thing going on outside the poem that the speaker avoids (feels scary even to imagine what it might be because you use words like burn and crackling and blisters and backache), as well as 2) this emotionally strenuous inner experience the speaker is having: an inability to manage this unnamed situation either actually, or emotionally.
And then there is raking. It feels TERRIBLE, this work. And yet it also feels pleasurable: who hasn't had that experience where you work your body so hard because you want to break yourself? Free yourself from your spinning mind!? Shake yourself! And in this poem, through the act of raking, you take us through the process: find out what the trouble is, gather it close, understand it, make it manageable, and exorcise it.
My favorite thing, besides all of it (I really, really love this poem) is: When nothing makes sense, there is raking. ! Such a surprise to read yet at the same time it is not an unfamiliar idea! And i love the Chaos line, of course, because you can ride it (the romance of its rhythm remains, btw) and of course, your Pow: There's no escape, but there is raking - which, COME ON, I mean: it holds true for every level of the poem: the raking makes you feel better but you've solved nothing; and in the act of raking itself, you've ordered things for now, but the raking never really ends. Raking is a recurring task!!!! GAH! AND, my God, even when you burn the carbon bits, THERE. IS. ASH.
Enamored with: Everything messy gathered and burned, and also the whole poem.
Happiness is poetry explosion.
As with every poem so far, i'm intoxicated more by Melissa's shared reading than my own bare reading of the poem at first. I don't mean to say that intoxication, like some Emily Dickinson effervescence, is my delight in poems. It is, and it isn't.
ReplyDeleteI love all the Sevenlings,and this the lucky ominous 7th. I think and feel a tension, an empty space, between the "raking" and the second stanza chaos and so on to, as Melissa exclaims, "Ash" -- with a bit of terrific bits in the fire and carbon and GAH and God and all the reckless out of the "recurring task". And then, i'd add, Darwin sings the gentle tales of the earthworms, renewing the earth out of his own soon interred body into the dirt of Downs.
More to blather, but the blog is limited as i found before, so perhaps this is enough for the time being, and i'll post more by e-mail?
It's hard to feel bad about internet blog limitations -- i hate the limitations as tho' that is some limit of care, of friendship, of asking, of listening. That's why i hate, so far, my experience of blogs. I feel bad in the fractal guessing of a writing of listening your way -- will it arrive? And how censored and scattered?