"The Many Sides of Death and Mortality"

     I choose death.  I have been obsessive about death for some time.  I am representing the two poem, "Snowbanks North of the House" written by Robert Bly, and "The Cove" written by Dick Allen.  The reason I have chosen these particular poems that is about death and the realization of mortality because you will notice both relate to water in sadness.  The ocean waves and the lake itself holds mystifying images and echoes in a person's head.  The incorporation of the water, the moon, the darkness, the grief, and as always the ocean waves calling as it does for many.

     The poem, "Snowbanks North of the House" when read out loud is not only spoken well but is very intense to the emotions of losing a son.  The mother generally stops just about everything she had always done.  The dad grieves separately, he cannot bring himself to accept this death at all.  Instead of them drawing together in their grief, each is totally wrapped up in their own separate world, therefore pulling them apart.

     There is so much poignant grief in this poem because their boy will not be coming in from school, or calling home.  Apparently, he liked to read, but there will be no more reading.  There is such a void, a huge empty space the parents cannot fuse together because they are realizing their life together revolved around their son, not each other.  "and the wife looks at her husband at a party and loves him no more (line 8,9)" "He turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone (line 17)"  All the feelings in this poem could not be felt with sympathy, but empathy.

     The part of this poem that disturbed me the most was the unknown stranger that could not bring himself to the people of the boy that did not know him.  This could be interpreted in many various ways.  Sometimes at funerals, you have people you don't know but they knew the person that died or they were special in some way, and we do stand back.  We don't feel like going through the motions of conversation.  "The toe pivots (20) In the dust...(21)"  I have many questions to all of you think who this man may be or what he represents.  If he was even real, I will go so far left here, that he could have been a comforter of sorts, there for the child's soul to take him home.  I know people will wonder where I got that from this poem but remember we are writing or life, death, grief, fears, and immortality. So there is nothing strange here because we do not know ourselves.

     I know I need to write about these poems together but they wrote of two different aspects of death.  They needed their own individual space.  Death is something most people don't want to think about and then others, it's very hard not to think about death on a daily average.  This poem, "The Cove" written by Dick Allen, was searching his own soul and his fears of mortality. Here again, we have water, this time a lake, but a lake speaks also as it is blown by the wind or something else.  Even when that lake is still, you will still see the movement of a ripple of some substance.

     This man, in his fifties, was in the dark, kneeled down looking out to the lake.  He even cupped his ear to see if he could hear anything because the images he was seeing in the cove were moving, sometimes small changing to a larger image, causing him more fear but still intrigued.  Such as death does to most people.  He wanted to try to find someone to help him reach whatever was there, but not really.  The moonlight was playing tricks on his mind. He was now fifty, a turning point in some lives, and he wasn't so sure he wanted to find out what was really out there in the cove of the lake.  This is the rustling of his own soul talking to him.  His own fears of maybe half of his life gone, so did he really want to find out what was out there?

     He imagined all sorts of things it could be, like a coffin surfacing up, and there is always that owl that keeps coming back to haunt so many poems, so many souls. He was so fixated on the image changing and not knowing where it would lea him if he actually knew what was there.  He had so many things happen in his life, he didn't actually want, and here he is at fifty.  Does he really want to take that chance to know for sure what is out there in the lake or what the future may hold him?  He didn't need another burden, as he sat alone thinking and looking, through his fifty year old mind, sitting there unable to make his choices of life.  As we all know, our lives come to an end, maybe by our own forces, or not.  We will all be dust in the end.

     I like the way both of these poems incorporate the ocean waves, the lake, the moon, the darkness of grief and the realization we are all going to die.  How much harder it is to lose a child, when we should always, in our minds leave this world before our children.  The aging man, torn between what he wants and his fears.  The water,  the trickling of the lake, the ocean waves calls us if we listen.  It calls to the soul, to soothe, sometimes to re-awaken you, but it speaks if you listen.  It depends on the person, the circumstances and frame of mind a person is in, but if that person would listen--really listen--the ocean, the lake, nature and omens do speak to us.