I'm trying to think if i know another poem addressed to a "you" who is a pretty unambiguously discernible concrete person in the narrator's life, but discernible only through clues that lead no other place yet who remains unnamed. It adds to the power of this piece that such is the case here. The distance - emotional distance - it creates from the unnamed but certifiable you (hm, maybe certifiable in more than one sense) - makes "you" feel like a specter out of February indeed.

There's a chill in the air. The narrator is back in time at a turning point in the relationship with her "accomplice" father and equally or perhaps even more with her absent mother. And with the hindsight of the adult, she reconstructs the event projecting into her mother's mind and rationale that her mother "must be" a series of things culminating with what I read as a fairly damning speculation that her mother must be burying herself in her religion because she thinks that is what being a mother - what others want from her as a mother/wife - should be.

Alas. No. The missing presence in this trauma for a 12-year-old girl's life speaks volumes, signals a missing presence at an emotional level (a February without sun) throughout her life ... Here at a turning point, when mom was never more needed to be part of their lives, with daughter and father being and feeling responsible - two "blunderers" - for killing a creature, a dog who "must have" run in front of the car, distraught with the grief of feeling like "thieves" of life, disquieted by the Siberian blues that won't close, the accusing eyes that indict them both.

And where is mother? It seems "mom" is even too warm a name for the unnamed third (powerful in her remove) force in this family. She is not "mom" but rather "the mother," reflecting back on her family in prayer as "the father" and "the daughter." The daughter is mired in the weight of her sense of having sinned, of reifying what one can imagine have been the daily voiced alarms of the mother, wary of and in constant repentence and remorse for sinning, such that she is removed from the living, the living who paradoxically feel grievously alive in the act of now needing to bury that which they have killed, accidently. Twelve years she's lived what are surely her mother's fixations with propriety and wariness, yielding "ladylike calm" (what kind of childhood is that? where are the hugs? where are the laughs and tumbles? the flesh and blood? avoiding life in function of mother's prayerful fear of "accidents").

Mother, the dutiful, is washing dishes or worshipping and beseeching protection (those being her jobs) but meanwhile not part of their lives, their real lives, their inner and emotional lives where now that prayed-for protection has crumbled like so much dead fur coming off in clumps. And just as February sun's appearance feels like a stolen pleasure that makes the cold body crave more, so in reverse the (lifelong) disappearance of February "you" has made the narrator (and her father?) crave a warmth she's only ever gotten by "thievery." And the mother herself, what a forlorn self-definition of what motherhood "must be."

I'd wax on, I'm sure (knowing that i've gone out on a limb with some of these interpretations, and there are nuances yet to process here in a poem that I find worthy to process - its hook, for me, was the February sun line), but I must remove myself. I suppose I ought to be wringing some prayers. Miles to go before I sleep. Finals week.

The difficulty I have here, and Zinya's post makes this point, is that the direction and variety of interpretation seems endless partly because thsi piece seems both ambivalent and judgemental.

It seems to me that a sentence like this "Mother, the dutiful, is washing dishes or worshipping and beseeching protection (those being her jobs) but meanwhile not part of their lives, their real lives, their inner and emotional lives where now that prayed-for protection has crumbled like so much dead fur coming off in clumps." is creating a narrative out of some pretty thin cloth.

I guess that's the issue I have: the narrative seems only half-baked or maybe more exactly passive-aggressive. The last two lines: "You must be delegating comfort to the saints./You must be imagining we need you this way." seem harshly judgemental. The Dad and Daughter have run over a dog and the daughter is upset that the Mother's reaction does not meet her needs? Who is that all about? In the end, my reaction is: So what happened to the dog?

This is an odd poem as it seems to ask for understanding, but it's psychological drama seems poorly thought out.

Comments anyone? Am I off base? I feel like I'm falling into a trap of being judgemental about a poem that thinks it's about not being judgemental....

We brought the dog home in the trunk.

All the way from school Dad said she was
back there, feet on the same red carpet as mine.

The February sun made me feel like a thief.

You're not part of this memory. Your figure is missing
from the strange gray half-light of the closed garage
where he tried but couldn't shut her eyes, Siberian blue,
where we stood, two blunderers, not knowing what to do
with the clumps of dead fur coming off in our hands.

One week before your birthday. You must be inside
washing dishes by hand, or wringing your prayers.
You must be respecting the father's collapse, his soft
exterior caving in like cake, the daughter's undoing
in one afternoon a dozen years of ladylike calm.

You must be delegating comfort to the saints.

You must be imagining we need you this way.

I can't disagree with you, oneart, I think the poem is badly constructed. The line "The February sun made me feel like a thief " is one of the worst I've read in a while.

Call me a fool, but I read it as the dog was killed by being stored in the trunk for too long. Thus the shock to find it dead when they opened the trunk in the garage.

Indeed, this poem is half-baked. Actually it would be better minus the bad "February sun" line, and would make more sense, provided this interpretation.

CM

Also, the mother is missing. Is she dead or aloof in her religious practices?

I read it as dead.

Which means its hard to fault her for not being there.

I'm trying to think if i know another poem addressed to a "you" who is a pretty unambiguously discernible concrete person in the narrator's life, but discernible only through clues that lead no other place yet who remains unnamed.

Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" is told by a duke to a man he is showing off his paintings to. That becomes clear only as the duke's narrative unfolds.

hi Cutter,

credit where credit is due. I just replied to this interp of yours stated in full version by SG in her thread and i didn't look back to see who here had made the same (i think wise) interp, i thought it had been Bratsche maybe but see now it is you. My fuller thoughts on the subject are in SG's thread, fwiw.

And obviously i'm the lone ranger who thought the Feb sun line reverberated interestingly (albeit, as with poem as a whole, not all that unambiguously).

z.

And where is mother? It seems "mom" is even too warm a name for the unnamed third (powerful in her remove) force in this family. She is not "mom" but rather "the mother,"

When we say “mother” in poems, we usually mean some woman in her late twenties or early thirties trying to raise a child.

We use this particular noun to secure the pathos of the child’s point of view and to hold her responsible.

-- from "Dragonflies Mating" by Robert Hass

<link>

Reading "Dragonflies Mating" was the high point of my day, PV. Thanks very much for introducing it to me. And I just know in my bones that you offer this poem to your students.

MA

And I just know in my bones that you offer this poem to your students.

...exactly why I was re-reading it today and thought of the section on "mother" in relation to the dog poem. We had already read the section on how Coyote made the world, just before reading a Native American creation myth from the textbook. I think that section is so funny and says so much about about creation stories in general and the very nature of existential wondering and explaining the unexplainable.

They say Red Fox, we say Coyote, so anyway...

wow. just now being able to settle in to this poem, with so many powerful elements in it, in each scenario, some of which i see threading together comprehensively on first blush, some of which make me wish to see it get OPP attention. Yes?

I loved how it made me smile at the end of 2.


Some of it made me think of Kinnell (Agape, Last Gods) ...


thanks, pv - you upped the ante here...