Sarah Gord Blog 9

Quite a few poets this week present identity as something cyclical and generational. Time is both deeply connected to identity and fluid. This is most apparent in “Spiritus Mundi,” when Jeet Thayil writes at the end of the poem, “All things combine and recombine” and “I am my father and my son grown old;” in these two lines, identity is linked to both history and the future. Not only the speaker but “all things” have been before and are going to become other than what they currently are (and the “all” connects them in this common practice). In “Ma’reb Speaks,” Maquilah writes, “my wrists bear the trace of shackles, my feet drag their fatigue.” The phrase “bear the trace” indicates that the physical shackles are no longer on the speaker’s wrists, but the weight of imprisonment remains palpable. In “break (rebirth),” the first line, “jesus left at thirty three” is later echoed in “i left at thirty three,” implicitly connecting Jesus (both as a historical and religious figure) to the speaker’s present identity. “Word to Everything I Love” also gestures toward a more fluid past/present with the line, “But these are the same mats / You stepped on before.” Although the poets use time in different ways, each of the ones mentioned present a profound connection between past/present/future (and time itself as nonlinear).  

“Deathsleep” also plays with time in an unusual way, and it was probably my favorite poem this week (though I’m still pretty puzzled by parts of it). The speaker is somehow very distant from himself and from his family, and the sense of “when” this poem is happening is unclear. It begins with “so far,” indicating that we are in his “present” moment, but because we haven’t been fully situated, this timestamp is ambiguous. How far are we to imagine going back? He describes himself as “a myopic member / of the family” – someone with a narrow vision,  someone lacking imagination. He refers to his children as “The sons and daughters,” “The wife,” and himself as “He” and “Dad.” This is a really jarring way to read about a family, showing how removed the speaker seems to be from not only his family members but from himself. He is an outside observer, but he becomes closer to us in the fourth stanza: “The sounds of their indiscriminate devouring / I could hear from the adjacent room.” He eventually transitions from “the wife” to “my wife,” then (oddly) to “my married wife.” The redundancy in this final line adds to the feelings of disconnectedness, exacerbated by the next two lines: “My married wife / Has no doubt that / I am not a real human.” This assumption his wife has made is not confirmed by the speaker, who actually reveals little information about himself to the reader. What we do learn mostly comes through other people’s perceptions of him. I found this poem so compelling but would love to hear others’ thoughts on what “deathsleep” represents. I get the sense of an unhappy man in a family where he feels disconnected, but I wonder if there’s something larger that I’m missing.