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.