“The Man Explains His Souvenirs” by Charles Rafferty. I know nothing about who Charles Rafferty is, and often skip the poetry in The New Yorker. The way the poems are stranded in the page, alone and contextless, surrounded by an article, seems very distressing. A feeling, which, for me at least, tends to preclude reading the poems. This one caught my attention anyway. From The New Yorker magazine, January 17, 2011.
The Man Explains His Souvenirs
Twenty years ago, the skeleton
of a wild pig gleamed among violets
while the leaf rot around it
grew hot with spring. I slipped
the molar out of its grin like an oiled key
and took it home, leaving the boar
to reassemble, if it ever did,
at a gap-toothed resurrection. I hold it up
to show my daughters. They are less
impressed each year. I have antlers
and trilobites and chips of pretty bedrock
from all the places where the sun came up
to burn me awake with beauty—even
a turtle shell we used as an ashtray
in the first apartment, on the bank
of a creek that flooded every March
and took our trash out to sea. All of it
sleeps in a basement box—a kind of coffin
for my former life, but also a proof
that I stooped to the world,
that I kept what came my way.
I wish I read poetry more often, its the only way to become fluent in understanding. Last night, I read some of the Frank O'Hara anthology from you, and it was mostly lost on me. These lines caught my eye from this one: I have antler/ and trilobites and chips of pretty bedrock/ from all the places where the sun came up/ to burn me awake with beauty.
ReplyDelete