This week’s poem appears to be from Liardet’s forthcoming collection, “a book-length elegy for a dead brother, which explores the psychodrama of family and the possibilities of evolutionary psychology….”

I think the poem is fancifully explaining how goose bumps or -- as the title uses -- “Goose Flesh,” has developed as an adaptation to ward off the fear of excessive motherly love. In the jargon of evolutionary psychology, such an adaptation is known as “incest avoidance.”

The key to the poem is contained in these lines –

……When she climbed out
and left a chilly shape where she had been

he felt his spine was corrugated and exposed,
every follicle of him, every single blond hair

always listening for her approach,
listening in all directions, from every hair.

Those blond hairs listening for his mother’s approach – doesn’t that sound like goose flesh?

The poem begins with the boy weeping – perhaps his brother has died. He needs to get dressed up, wearing a fancy shirt with bone buttons and a bow tie (the “absurd butterfly” clipped to his collar) – perhaps for the funeral.

I very much like how Liardet has described the way the boy’s mother helps him get dressed and then returns to comfort him. From the boy’s point of view, it’s as if she has become part of his body or has come in too-close proximity to his body. Such closeness can be stifling when a young boy is trying to establish his own identity separate from the rest of his family.

Liardet has chosen a wonderful phrase in the next-to-last stanza – “canal sack.” I’m guessing that’s a British term equivalent to our gunny sack thrown into a pond or lake to drown the unwanted animals inside. The boy and his mother are like two animals inside the sack, struggling to stay alive. But “canal sack” also connotes the amniotic sac inside the birth canal. The mother is “trying to keep the other where he was” – part of herself. The boy, however, is “trying to escape from his shirt.”

We don’t know who will win out. All we know is that the boy will now feel goose flesh whenever his mother comes near and is too over-bearing, too protective. He may have needed some maternal help while he was grieving, but he doesn’t want it to continue.

Hi, MaryAnn, I truly appreciate your analysis of this poem. The missing piece for me was why the boy would be weeping -- I thought at first it was because of his mother's intrusive and clingy habits. But if indeed his brother has died, not only does that explain the weeping, it might also explain the mother's behavior -- a transference of love for a lost child intensely focused upon the remaining child.

Hi MaryAnn, I enjoyed your comments. From the title to the end of the poem, Liardet sure likes his s’s, that’s for dang sure. I still see this as an internal story, MaryAnn, but I’ll go back and read it again.

MA: The key to the poem is contained in these lines –

……When she climbed out
and left a chilly shape where she had been

he felt his spine was corrugated and exposed,
every follicle of him, every single blond hair

always listening for her approach,
listening in all directions, from every hair.

I’ll tell you one thing, any poet who writes poetry where you need to have knowledge of evolutionary psychology certainly has chutzpah; I’ll give him that. I think the poem reads creepy, that’s what I like about it.

(And you mentioned once before – if memory serves - that you compose your posts online…really?)

(And you mentioned once before – if memory serves - that you compose your posts online…really?)

No, not the longer ones, HAP. I would be really upset if I spent 30 minutes writing a post that accidentally disappeared just before I was ready to hit the submit button.

I’ll tell you one thing, any poet who writes poetry where you need to have knowledge of evolutionary psychology certainly has chutzpah; I’ll give him that. I think the poem reads creepy, that’s what I like about it.

Chek it out at Wikipedia. It's a fascinating new area of research and study.

Well, I don't know where to put this comment, and don't intend to much elaborate anyway, but it's feeling like I have to say something (even though I still don't know if i "like" the poem), since I don't seem to have read this poem like anyone else has ...

To me, the first sentence of the poem tells us that it - and thus for me the entire poem - cannot be taken other than metaphorically. It's a given that the first sentence is not literal ... isn't it? Some here seem to not be attending to the fact (as I read it) that "she" AND the "weeping boy" are climbing (together) into his sleeves and pant legs. Since that scenario is like something out of either a drug-induced trip or a fanciful children's book sojourn or ... other surreal exotica, I told myself from the outset that this was not a poem to be taken literally (okay, I already said that).

Hence (or not), I read what ensued as a kind of lover's "tripping" about the intense intimacy of bond with "her" - a highly fused sense of oneness in two bodies - where hands and legs get confused as to whose is whose, where sensations pass from, through and between one and/to the other such that a real sense of displacement takes place, no longer knowing where one's own boundaries stop and another's start... The spooning position is described in a way so as to evoke a sort of "swimming" into each other (I imagined it as potentially reciprocal even though the story here focuses on one - recipient's - experience of the 'fusion' ... and lostness in this new thing that is coupling, coupledom, loss of 'self' into it ...

And since "goose flesh" itself is metaphor ... well, that's how I first read it and so far it's the only reading for me that makes sense of the totality ...

fwiw :-)

z