Osherow

Moon Sonnet

Hey, Moon. Remember me? It's been a while
since I last came around for conversation.
My stoop an improvised confessional,
I'd talk and talk and talk and you would listen.
It was thrilling while it lasted, I was young.
Now I've come looking for some help.
The truth is, Moon, a lot's gone wrong;
I was hoping our paths could overlap,
that you might tell me where you find the patience
to get yourself from empty back to full.
(I've watched you, fingernail by fingernail;
eventually you always hit your stride.)
Do you think, if I made a vow of silence,
you'd let me come along once for the ride?


I love this poem because it starts out in a more playful manner than a lot of the ones in Whitehorn.  I think throughout the entire book she uses an amazing rhythm and use of rhyme that is sort of a lost art in poetry when it comes to the more modern and post modern works.  I enjoy end rhymes such as the last three lines in this poem. I think the that the relationship with the moon was something I think we all have at some point.  I can think of many times that I would be sitting outside and just look up to the moon and stars and talk and search for the answers to my questions.  I also like at the end that Osherow points out that sometimes we just have to accept that we must embrace silence. I think the magic of this poem is the use of simple repetition: "i'd talk and talk and talk..." "fingernail by fingernail"  These lines further describe her enteractions with the moon and her realization about her vow of silence.

Toi Dericotte

I think that this is a poet that I have connected with the most in a while.  I am not sure why considering I am by no means a feminist, at least I don't think I am.  But, as I was reading through "The Undertaker's Daughter" I found myself enthralled in the metaphors and connections that Dericotte draws from these stories and remembrances that she has put into poetry.  I know that it is best to think that the poet did not live out the events that they write about, but the words she writes are so sincere it is hard to think that the situations are anything short of genuine.  I connect to the poems about her father in an odd way.  I say this because it seems that we are polar opposites in the relationships we had with our fathers.  When reading her poem "The Undertaker's Daughter" I was so connected and I felt that I knew what she was saying and I knew the yearning for seeing the feminine side of her father and the maternity come out of him.

In this poem the lines that were especially striking to me were the last few sets of couplets. 

"Once, when I opened the door & saw

him shaving, naked, the sole of his foot
resting on the toilet, I thought

those things hanging down were
udders.  From then on I understood there was a

female part he hid -- something
soft & unportected

I shouldn't see."

I think that these lines are what really describe Dericotte's moment of clarity as a child growing up in an abusive situation with no maternal figure.  She yearned to have that sensitivity and love and I feel that she had a love for her father that was unconditional and she was trying to find justification for herself.  In this image that she paints we see all masculinity stripped down and we are left with a man, bare, and no guard.  I think the image of him being naked is striking in the fact that a child really never sees their father that way.  He is the strong figure and in her case a figure that is feared.  By comparing his genitalia as feminine and animalistic features such as udders she is breaking down that fear, which is where that final clarity comes from. 

Love by Ruth Stone

The part of myself devoted to you
admits of nothing that falls away.
Although I melt moment by moment
into something else, I carry you
with me, a doll of circumstance,
that dances as  I do when I
present myself, the stranger,
to you, the stranger.  We speak
of them hurriedly.  We
take them out of our breasts
and hold them out to each other
the glass hearts, the transparent bodies.


This poem speaks so much in a beautiful way.  I think my favorite thing about Ruth Stone is her use of language.  It is a form that anybody can connect to on many levels.  I normally stray away from "love" poems simply because I fear getting "cheesy" or "cliche".  However, I think that Stone throws all of that out of the window here.  This poem is so sincere and warm.  My favorite lines in this poem are

 "Although I melt moment by moment
into something else, I carry you
with me, a doll of circumstance,
that dances as I do when I
present myself, the stranger,
to you, the stranger. We speak"

Everything about these lines scream what one feels in new, weathered, or any other kind of love.  It is as if she is telling us that love is a driving force, changing us, making us creatures of circumstance or "doll" as she puts it.  I especially connect to the part about "myself, the stranger, to you, the stranger" not only to these lines simply connect to the reader but the way the lines read simply poetically offers a beauty that the entire poem holds.

The Electric Fan and The Dead Man (or the window as a useful object toward the end of the century)

She remembers his covert sleeves,
the sadness of his quiet.

Still, there is the unplugged fan
staring at the floor
with the nonexpression of the working class
temporarily laid off,
ignorant of where its wild pulsating energy comes from,
like the former ideal woman,
ready to serve you right up,
and then, the flipping eyebrows,
the gesture of wringing hands.

He lies folding into himself.
Was it the velvet vest that gave him such gravity?
She thinks, looking back,
that he was the product of his time,
the first half of that section up through the fifties.
While she is more like the fan, sighing her way into the last half;
more useful now  than then... to stir the air, i.e.,
the projected rise in temperatures
and boiling in your own sweat... etc.
(A slight up, Fahrenheit-wise,
of the blood, and its zap.)

The fan, ready for service, bent neck, sans bathrobe,
or, for all that, sans torso; really just a head;
but still, something oiled about the skin,
although stiff enough,
ready to smile
without implying anything original
or shocked - more than one would be by
sticking a pinky into a wall socket.

What is imperative is the off switch;
which he, at one point some time ago,
opted for himself.
Tied a silk cord around his meat neck
and hung his meat body, loved though it was,
in order to insure absolute quiet,
on the back of a rented door in soho.
And on a certain level that did it.
But as for her, to mix the metaphor,
she continues, having once read Huysmans in the original,
ready for, at least mechanically, fin de siecle, a rebours. 



The beginning of this poem I feel is a way I would start one of my own.  "She remembers his covert sleeves, sadness of his quiet."  Starting with a reflection of painting a scene of levels of human nature is one of my favorite uses of poetry.  In this poem I feel that as I am guided through this horrid scene Stone offers such a beautiful use of a simple language that I get lost in the fact that I am being described a suicide.

The fan in this seems to be the innocent witness to this horrible scene.  Stone uses the fan as the eyes to what happened to the man who hung himself with a silk cord.  It gives knew light on a tragic incident and evokes a new emotion in the reader, or allows the reader to acquire their own emotion or connection to the scene without clouding it with empathy through another person's eyes.  I think the beauty in this is the simplicity and the use of the scene that none of us want to face but we all know is so real.  I feel that respect for life and death in the poem is beautiful and Stone really touches on that.