Poetry Week #005: Test Day!

          Ok, it’s test day! The first task, if you haven’t done that already, is to read yesterday’s post about connotation, symbolism, and allusion in Lorna Crozier’s “Crossing Willow Bridge.” Your job today is to look at Karen Connelly’s  “From My Father’s Hand,” and see what you can find. Objects and items and symbols abound. What do YOU see?

FROM MY FATHER’S HAND

In the pockets

I find horses’ hair,

the sleek fur of a pussy willow,

old keys.

I reach into that house

     and pull out the painful creak

     of the stairs.

I find a ruined painting on a water-stained wall,

     a photograph too old to be real.

In the bottom of a drawer

there is a poem by Alexander

     —All creatures great and small—

          and finally I have to laugh at that.

All of these things

lie about you.

They mutter dreams to me,

words I never heard you say.

You shot the gray-hooved pony,

     axed away marsh willows.

Your keys always shone like polished copper,

          cold in my hands,

          bright as blood.

Can it be you spent

     your whole life

     killing what you didn’t mean to?

The romantic wind does not

     blow any truths into my hair.

     Nothing is that easy.

But if you did live

     by drawing death,

     who and what am I?

Only splinters of spruce and bone

     are left in my skin,

     slivers of the questions

     I carved in this house

          where you lived.

And here is one more, with my apologies

     tacked on like a crimson target:

          Why do I use the house, the dusty pocket,

          the past tense as if you were dead and I

          am suffering some warped sorrow?

You are there, in the field, walking home.

The red sun cuts over your head like a knife.

A clean rifle is slung over your shoulder

     and a doe rabbit hangs from your fist

          by thin silk ears.

Her blood touches your leg like a hand.

Try this:

Find the strong, connotative words, especially the negative ones. What’s going on here? Find objects that may be symbols. What’s going on here? Find an allusion or two. WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?

Then write your own poem and fill it with creepy connotation, stirring symbolism, and alluring allusion.

Coming tomorrow: Cody Klippenstein’s work = strong, strong VOICE! We’ll be looking at five ways she makes it so strong in her writing over the next five days, by looking at an award-winning story of hers: “Case Studies in Ascension.”