Image IV (12.24.21)

I had this notion about "radical imagery" at the end the of my previous post, so I went looking through my library for an example.  I could have found a brighter poem for this post, but this one struck me as illustrative . . .

DECEASED

it comes back

unopened

why open 

to see what I said

there was

much to tell you

now there is nothing

to say

The poem was written by Cid Corman, once the editor of Origin magazine and press.  I was leafing through my much-thumbed copy of The Voice That Is Great Within Us, edited by Hayden Carruth (If you want to write poetry seriously, this book should be among your collection.), looking for a short poem that presents an image that grabs the reader and voilá, "Deceased."

So, what's the image?

What struck me upon reading this little poem is how it presents an image so obliquely, so rooted in suggestion, that you can't really describe it head on.  Is it a visual image?  A tactile image?  An aural?  A sonic image?

Well, every poem, every utterance, presents a sonic image.  This series on imagery isn't about how you make a poem sound.  This series is about how you make a poem feel.  It's about the emotional content of images, or rather, the emotional responses certain images elicit from us. 

What I pick up on in this poem is first a visual image, and a very precise and particular one at that.  It's of an unopened letter in a man's hand.  I see the hand, I see the rectangle of the envelope.  That's quite an image . . . and nowhere in this little poem is a hand mentioned, or even a letter, except obliquely: "it."  Also, I see a certain cast of sunlight into a hallway or foyer inside a front door, where a man might receive the day's mail.  It's the cast of light one gets in the late afternoon.  The man has returned from a day elsewhere, at work, maybe, to find his mail.

I know what the man holds isn't a post card; it's unopened.  It can't be a note of thanks or hello or congratulations or concern; there was "much to tell" in it.  And like all letters to which we give deeper thought, this one went out bearing news to its recipient.  None of the above is explicit in the poem.  But that's the image I see in my mind's eye.  A good image well-made should encourage me to extrapolate, within reason: what the sender had "to tell" might have been news of himself after a long hiatus; or it might have been an apology (as in an explanation or a begging for forgiveness); or might have been some timely advice.  The poem is not giving me this information.  I infer it and I could be wrong; no doubt I am.  But the image ferries me toward these emotional possibilities.

I can infer from the poem, again because it never is explicit about it, a tactile image.  I feel the envelope's weight in the hand, its heavy, news-bearing ounces.  (News going both ways, by the way: news to the recipient, news back to the sender.)  I feel its edges and corners against the fingers of the hand that holds it.  For me, this tactile-ness is the strongest image of the poem, while the least explicit.  I feel its size and weight and its geometry all at once.  Its pressure is what stays with me.

As for the poem's aural imagery, by this I mean what I hear in the "drama" of the moment (as opposed to the beat, cadence and music of the language).  What I hear is silence, or perhaps a clock ticking in a quiet house, or a refrigerator motor whirring, or some outside traffic noise that I wouldn't have paid attention to, wouldn't have "heard" otherwise.  I hear a man standing in a foyer who has just stopped sorting through his mail.  He is speechless and the house is silent.

The title is the news that has come back, of course, which makes possible all the emotional power of the implied images.  Under it, the poem brings together a complex of responses.  I see a man in the foyer of a quiet house who was sorting his mail a moment ago but who now stands still, holding in his hand the letter full of news that he'd sent to someone who is dead.  And I feel the weight of his moment.  I hear the silence of it.

If I say that images drive poems into us like nails, I mean images like these.  A good poem, a good writer, needn't even spell them out.