levelheaded: [180]

The simple image of breath on a windowpane is presented through the first few lines of this week’s poem. But, that breath being “of” a face also makes the breath itself an apparition. Reading these lines again, maybe the image being presented is actually someone on the opposite side of the window who is breathing—say, someone out in the street whose breath is visible to the person watching him or her through the window from inside.

When someone “does a 180,” he or she turns in the opposite direction from the path he or she was on. As we can see from a close examination of the poem’s first few lines, Jared Joseph challenges us to look at the picture from all angles. The spelling of “pain” points toward the idea that there is an emotional force embedded in this complicated initial image. Similarly, the word “complete” as a descriptor for sons lends itself to a myriad of interpretations. Are the sons “complete” because they are grown up, because they are as fully sons as sons can be, or is it because they are no longer alive and hence, their existence as sons has been completed?

We like this last read best because it is supported by the line “So no one.” Loneliness may be the root of the speaker’s pain, as is further evidenced by “No kisses in the mother” and “The fishermen [who] have gone home.”

We’ve talked about the speaker, but there’s no “I” in the poem. That lack of a first-person narrator contributes to the poem’s somber feel, its ghost-town atmosphere. It’s interesting to consider the absence of a speaker when he or she has no relationships through which to define him or herself. Look one way, there’s a speaker suffering. Do a 180, there’s no one even there to experience pain. Which is more devastating? Which is more of a relief?

– The Editors