levelheaded: Mineral to Marrow

This poem begins quietly. The title, with an alliterative and abstract “mineral” and “marrow,” is vague in a familiar, poetic way. The speaker delicately describes a portrait with a man dressed in “blue satin” and with a “gaze, opaque.” Within this quiet, lyrical mode though, the speaker identifies the portrait’s subject as a “plantation owner” and points out his “imperious crooked arm.” Even in these early moments, the poem begins its metamorphosis from quiet observation to outright anger.

It’s an anger that ultimately damns the past and the present, an anger that damns the plantation owner and implicates the speaker in America’s continuum of racial injustice. The speaker’s “reflection” – what makes her “part of this puzzle” – includes her in the portrait. By superimposing an image of her face on top of his, she can see her own “opaque” gaze alongside the face of the plantation owner. In her “move closer,” she suggests the plantation owner is part of a puzzle “roped / together” into an inhuman, immoral, corrupt system. But how is she involved? Well, she is involved when she looks at and considers the portrait. Her gaze makes the portrait part of a past that extends into her own life. And it makes her a participant in a collective narrative that often has “blue satin” draped all over the ugly parts.

And that’s exactly why the final strophe cuts out all the ambiguity. The speaker tells us “we’re roped / together, beyond grace, in a knot / that cuts too harsh for metaphor.” Then she removes the metaphor. She pulls away the satin. She rips off the curled wig. The word “you,” which had maintained a vestigial distance between the speaker and plantation owner, is gone. “How did it feel to own another?,” she asks outright. And that ugly question about the past is coupled with something more recent – another ugly part of our narrative told plainly, this time from just “the other day.”

– The Editors