levelheaded: Schooner

The first line of Shiela Stewart’s “Schooner” begins with a clear command: “Take her drawings down from the wall” and ends with the metaphorically rich noun, “negatives.” This end word complicates a rather simple instrcution as we consider the word “negatives” not only to mean, in its broadest sense, bad things, but in the context of photography and beyond, to be where light appears dark and dark appears light.

In many ways, this poem embodies the role reversal inherent in photographic negatives. The parent whose child is in “another city” can no longer help the daughter, and he or she turns to the child’s art to cope with this fact. Mom or dad can find solace in the possibility that, despite a harsh world of fire-breathing dragons and pirate ships, the child may still see it as one where “sun and cloud smile above.” But make no mistake, the kid’s on her own, walking “into rooms you haven’t / seen.”

Stewart further illustrates this separation of parent and child through the indentation of the second stanza. They’re on different longitudinal coordinates on the map of this poem. The details of this place (“sunlight on counter, doubloons, pieces of eight”) get progressively stranger, demonstrating how little the parent actually knows of the daughter’s new life.

To combat all of this uncertainty, the changed relationship, the parent clings to the past, moving the child’s “blessed art to face your bed.” Here, the word “blessed” seems especially significant as the drawing takes on something akin to religious importance. The phrase “Bow and keel,” references parts of a boat, but it is also strikingly similar to “bow and kneel,” actions taken in demonstrations of worship.  This final command is followed up with the suggestion that “what” itself (that is, the unknown) “will be your figurehead.”

– The Editors