Poems #4

Burying an Animal on the Way to the New York by Gerald Stern
The title made me think this poem was going to be a narrative. I was entirely wrong. The poem says to keep driving and not swerve when you see road kill in your path because you are helping to bury it. Stern gives a descriptive account of the dead animal, but not in a disgusting way. The description is subtle in such lines as "brown flesh", "crushed limbs", and "dark spot." He compares motorists that drive over road kill to mourners. His reference to the "first suffering" creates the image of the actual act of running over the animal in the mind of the reader. The shift takes place when the poem stops describing the scene and tells you to respect and learn from it. While reading the poem the reader begins to feel pity for the animal. The author's tone shows he respects the circle of life. The poem seems to remind us that death is simply part of life and we should respect it.
Stern did a good job of writing about what most of us consider a disgusting subject in a not disgusting way. I doubt there are few who can write about road kill with such grace. For some reason the poem makes me picture a squirrel. Maybe I get that from the line "crushed limbs," since squirrels do a lot with their hands. I like the first eight or so lines because they seemed to to concentrate on the awareness of a life lost. However when he talks about "shreds of spirit and little ghost fragments," in the last lines, I kept seeing little squirrels' ghosts floating through the air and it killed the mood for me.

Question by May Swenson
From the title I thought that Swenson was going to ask some of life's profound questions. While she did ask questions, they were narrower than I originally imagined. Swenson ask what she is going to do when her home, horse, and hound are gone. She uses no punctuation in the poem save a question mark at the very end. That is where the title comes in. The whole poem is one big question. In the the first stanza she addresses the objects she is worried about losing. Then she changes and refers to them asking the audiences what she will do when they are gone. She gives specific details as to what each one of them gives to her life. The author wants the reader to feel the anxiety that she is going through when she considers losing these things. She herself feels very insecure. The shift comes at the very end when the true feelings of the author come out. She asks "With cloud for shift how will I hide?." She isn't just speaking about her house, horse, and hound, but of the security she has being surrounded by familiar things in life. The poem's theme is that everyone can't be certain of things in life and things can be taken away at any time.
The lack of punctuation made reading it the first time difficult because I never felt like I could pause. That in itself gave off the feeling of anxiety cause the lines seem to rattle on and on. If Body is her hound, which is what I gather from the third stanza, why does she put, "Body my house my horse my hound" at the beginning? The stanza describing what her horse and hound do for her was easy to understand. I didn't fully understand the stanza about her house. I gathered that the reference to lying in the sky was talking about being exposed without her house.