levelheaded: The Feeling of Yesterday in Today

In her moving, understated poem, “The Feeling of Yesterday in Today,” Carrie Chappell opens up a window into the experience of her five-year-old speaker. We’re given the child’s observations in first person. The poem is the child’s flow of thought while observing her body, a tender take forming through the examination of physical signs, which in turn evoke memory and sensation, perhaps also pain and confusion.

The map charted by the speaker is one drawn through observing various “marks,” making up not only a fragmented image of the child’s body, but also a map of her experiences thus far. Making up the majority of this chart’s nodes and lines are three words: “mark” (also “marks,” “marked,” and “un-marked”), “hand” (or “hands”), and “here,” appearing in the poem thirteen, fourteen, and twenty-two times respectively. In a sense, these three words make up a cornerstone image, out of which the poem springs each time, or each stanza, in different directions stemming from the same source.

There is a sense of judgment and maybe also oppression, which we notice most significantly in the italicized words. “Here the hand / is writing properly” suggests the concept of a hand’s movement having a proper form is confusing to the child, who either follows obediently or fails to do so and is reminded of her inadequate performance. The word “ruined” has a similar effect, suggesting the child is told something is ruined but cannot figure out why, or what that means. She (if we may use the pronoun, given the “five-year-old girl”) utters the word as “rooned,” further failing to pronounce it, well, properly. Finally, the word “no” is repeated in its italicized style twice, the second time in its own line, emphasizing this little drama which must not be little at all in the experience of the child—refused, blocked, overpowered. It is her mother grabbing her hands, hinting perhaps of the focalizer or underlying narrator of the poem.

This late appearance of the mother adds a dimension to the poem. We imagine she may be experiencing pain or guilt fueled by a sudden grasp of how the child must have felt while these interactions took place. She gives us the child’s take, while keeping herself an invisible (to the reader) presence, an authority directing the child, revealed only towards the end through her thwarting touch—hand over hand.

Stylistically, the poem streams down in a slow place, controlled by line breaks often producing multiple meanings, relevant to the child-like experience the poem portrays. To choose one example: “Here is the mark of the tongue, / here the syllable not / turned over. Here is a mouth absent / a tooth. And here, here the hand feeling, / filling the absence.” Fragments turn into smaller fragments, as with the mouth and the tooth. Sonic similarity turns sensation to function, as with “feeling” and “filling.” Whole or fractured, present or missing, the visuals are body parts or lack thereof, and the underlying subject is the child’s fragile sense of authority, confused sense of what’s appropriate, urges and restrictions neither of which can be fully grasped just yet.

We’d like to tell this child, and also her mother: we understand. We see the mark, the hand. It is here, with all of us.

– The Editors