Coming To In a Grove of Antlers
My second language was born
of absence. Desire, and need. First fur,
then came gold. A let’s-pretend realism
flimmering in the mouth. You have left
so much here, with me, to weather.
I go down a little
slope to where the trapper cabin
leans, thewy, humbly knuckled to a weedy
gravel lot. There, there. In the back splitting
spruce I see a gray jay and think, Here
is where I’ll dig my den. I’ll rubble my shadow
with snow. Then, with its damper pedal down,
I’ll overhear some gentle dying—
The snow comes over you, you are overcome with snow.
I’ll let this small death in, place its trembling
repose in a bowl of crowberries, frozen
bits of meat stacked beside it. I’ll scrape it
with my knife.
Outside a winter bear has been
swatting at ravens, ratcheting wildly the space
between. Me, the window. I go over to have
a look. I walk toward the window, whitening.
| Nolan Chessman |
|
levelheaded: Coming To In a Grove of Antlers
Strangeness in poems can be annoying. It often feels disingenuous. The weird details of “Coming To In a Grove of Antlers[,]” however, seem necessary, allowing the speaker to peek out from behind his imagination so he might discover reality.
The cabin mentioned in the second stanza is a “trapper” cabin. Without his saying so, we understand the speaker’s trapped. “[H]umbly knuckled to a weedy / gravel lot[,]” the cabin and its grounds are quietly devastating, the hard word “knuckled” softened by the adjective before it. The desolate scene mirrors the speaker’s desolate emotional state.
You might be thinking—hang on, I didn’t get that this dude was feeling down at all. Ah, beloved reader, he has told us just that! The second stanza opens with the line: “I go down a little,” which is what leads us to the “trapper cabin.” At the close of the first stanza, a sly line break sheds light on the reason for his strife: “You have left / so much here, with me, to weather.” Knowing our speaker’s been abandoned, we can better understand why his “second language was born / of absence.” And his resignation to the thought that there is “so much here, with me, to weather” reads several ways. He has to “weather” his sadness. At the same time, it seems that there isn’t much order to the world, that joy and pain are as finicky as the “weather.”
Punctuation marks abound, this poem’s halting quality feeds into its metaphorical content. Separated by commas and periods, the elements of our speaker’s world are noticeably isolated (“There, there.”). When, “The snow comes over you, you are overcome with snow[,]” the heartbreak piles up, and does so as if it were happening to one self, then the next. Our restrained speaker comes to these words as an embodiment of “some gentle dying” he half hears.
For the first four stanzas, the persona is distant, lethargic, a sloth succumbing to unending despair. In stanza five, he witnesses a “winter bear” violently “swatting at ravens” markedly symbolic of death. The bear’s rising up has a subtle, but profound impact on our speaker. He says, “I go over to have / a look. I walk toward the window, whitening.” The phrase “I go over to have” has so many awesome meanings we couldn’t possibly consider them all here, but check out how these couple ideas are packed into that seemingly casual phrase—ending one thing welcomes another; reflection begets possession.
Privy to an animal that has taken action, our speaker begins to act himself. As a result, the unnatural world is made beautifully natural again. It’s as if the speaker, in his unreal world, “comes to” his senses. Like the bear, he must fight against death and the hurt born from it. Bleaching his shadow with snow couldn’t cure him. But seeing the world as it is empowers him to “walk to the window, whitening.”
– The Editors
