I know you speak to your sons of me
gathered ghosts circling the only tree
left standing in a roped-off field. Though you could also be fog
on mountains now, this is when you might say Look up,
the birds hop from branch to branch. The squirrels now too,
so alive. Eventually,
the three of you will uproot this tree,
drag it into the lake, and swim until morning.
This is only gravity. Look how it tips, drops, settles
into the bones of everything: this mouth of mine,
the curl of lake departing, the reminders of lake left behind,
the silence I must assume is you listening closely.
| Ben Clark |
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levelheaded: I know you speak to your sons of me
Significantly, this poem is framed by speaking and listening. We don’t know much about the speaker – the poem’s “me” – but we know the listeners are slippery, unsettled, and intangible. These “gathered ghosts” disperse further into a “fog” then crystallize into a specific “the three of you.” “[T]he three of you,” in particular, is a precisely directed phrase (plus, three is a magic number). We aren’t the only faceless, diffuse addressees of the poem. We are witnesses to a sort of dramatic discourse. We are watching something happen, and thus we are relegated to an outside perspective. Still, we aren’t completely divested from the poem. The repeated “you” implicates us regardless of the speaker’s intentions. We are also subtly allied with this unnamed three.
We can’t know who the three addressees are, but we can get an idea of what the speaker means to say to them. To that end, the poem is largely about speaking. This is a short, tightly woven poem, and its multiple references to speaking – “you speak to your sons of me,” “you might say,” “this mouth of mine” – make its thematic core. First, the poem’s title is paranoid and accusatory. Then the speaker resorts to conjecture with a very precise guess as to what “you might say.” There’s more about what will be said or might be done than what is actually said and done. Thus, the poem is preoccupied by what’s unknowable, by what could, might, or will happen.
Speaking of things unknowable, the poem is dense with juxtapositions of life and death. The poem’s initial image is of “the only tree / left standing in a roped-off field.” Then we see birds hopping around and “squirrels now too, / so alive.” That same tree is uprooted and dragged to a lake. There are bones, then there’s a mouth. The poem taps into something large. This largeness is tied to the poem’s abstract “gravity,” belittled as “only gravity,” which “tips, drops, settles / into the bones of everything.” This “gravity” represents some grand, oppressive, and perhaps not entirely malevolent force in the world. It also represents gravity, which is itself a grand, oppressive, and perhaps not entirely malevolent force. And ultimately, it brings us down to the poem’s wonderful final line with all its hissing, static splendor: “the silence I must assume is you listening closely.”
– The Editors
