levelheaded: Mountain Man

Ultimately, the poem is place-centric. The title refers of course to those rugged trappers and explorers who opened up North American trails, allowing for settling of those new territories by Americans from the east. The poem’s first line, “The love in this place,” becomes a refrain, appearing two more times.

As the poem moves along, it becomes clear that “this place” is a domestic scene, and not a temporary camp barely staving off the brutal wild. The moment of certainty here hinges on whether you know what “palm mutes” are. If you do, the anachronism would tip you off that we’ve not been transported backward to the mountain men era; if you don’t, the “table / piled high with bills and books” seems to be when we say “Aha!” Dual points being: a) Should you happen across any word or phrase you’re unfamiliar with in a poem, whether you look it up can entirely change your reading of the thing, and b) As poems are typically compact, it can prove instructive to try and pinpoint exactly when and where pivots occur.

As for love, it’s obviously important to this guy. He claims it can “make a person / squirm”; that it “isn’t purple, but it’s pink”; and that it “will save us / or it won’t.”

Claim number one uses a deft line break, hinting at the power of love to move people to procreate. Again, Hart gives the line break a hard work-out in the second instance, but only after saying what love isn’t. Hart examines from this negated angle, too. The line continues on “but it’s pink / burgers,” forcing the reader to stay active in her reading, to reclassify her impressions. The final time the phrase comes up, at the very end of the poem, it’s not its own line (as it is twice before), signaling some shift in the speaker. Here we get a little more of the mountain man. Our connotations of him are that he’s self-sufficient, attempting to carry out his work within nature. Especially when life is lived so close to nature, but always, the survival instinct is—well, vital. Love is a kind of survival instinct, fastening people together into tiny armies, constantly asking them to prove their commitment to one another through their actions over time. “The love / in this place” may contribute to the longevity of those involved, but it can’t “save” them forever; they will die.

Because the speaker says, about halfway through, “Once I was a mountain man, / but it may have been / this morning,” we must mention that mountain men were famously trappers, and that trap is slang for mouth, and then that singing/music are very present in the poem. There are several musical associations with the phrase “Mountain Man” (songs, groups); those palm mutes; the “intractable three-part / harmony”; the “holy dissonance, / which is all and forever / and only about clashing.” Hart dramatizes the poem by including musical sensations.

Also, interestingly, traps depend on their locations. You wouldn’t set a snare trap in your mudroom and expect to catch a beaver while you go finish your hand of cards. We already talked about the role place plays in the poem. Take that and combine it with the fact that the word origin of trap is step, staircase, tread, and we’re left thinking we could continue and read the poem in this way (step, staircase as distinctly domestic, distinctly indoors; deception, etc.)—but our time is up.

The poem is a rich, full one that lends itself to rich and full readings.

– The Editors