Combustion

It was hard to choose what to write about this week. All of the readings were strong, complex, and evoked deep contemplation. There were so many places to begin that I didn’t know where to start. I decided to look at Maria de Los Santos’s poem “October: One Year Later” because the poem has stayed with me this week, and will continue to do so for a long time. It illustrates a sense of recurring loss, connection, and disconnection, which I believe echo themes in both Su and Nezhukumatathil’s work.

 In “October: One Year Later” imagery threads together powerful lines that combust in the finial stanza.

           

a red tree—a plume of sparks

 among the green—how this landscape’s

beauty can sing like the burst

from an orange at the first dig

of fingernails, the first pulling back.

The images in the last stanza fracture the tension that was being carefully held together until the poem explodes.  And while the explosions appear very different— a red tree sparking, a bursting orange, they both convey a vivid sense of violence. The imagery is beautiful, but there is something uncomfortable in what we are being shown by the speaker, which culminates in the last lines. For example, the visceral sense of separation begins in the first line of the poem with the man and woman, literally, on separate sides of the line.  The separation continues as the poem explores their different perspectives of the landscape and ends with bursting and plumes: “the first pulling back(20).”

The explosions in the final stanza are arresting, and demonstrate an exquisite process of disintegration. They are connected by violence, perspective, and landscape, but what is the landscape in this poem?  We are never told where this scene takes place. And while there is a sense of place with the rickrack fences, pillared porches and battlefields the speaker never names the location. What does the lack of name imply when the poem begins with “He takes the long way through her / state keeps to the valley farm road (1-2)” What does her state refer too?  Is it a state such as Connecticut? Is it her state of mind or her body? We never know. We can only guess if the landscape is, only, physical or something more. In not revealing the location or “state” where the poem takes place in it echoes the complexity of the situation. The potentiality of the speaker’s depth remains in question, which leaves us wondering if the words on the page are another possible landscape to consider.

de Los Santos, Maria. “October: One Year Later.” Ed. Victoria Chang. Asian American Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Print.