Date of Award

Spring 1986

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

Program/Concentration

English

Committee Director

Bruce Weigl

Committee Member

Philip Raisor

Call Number for Print

Special Collections ; LD4331.E64T62

Abstract

The payment for my mortality is love and this contract ties in heavily with the poems of This Blood in All of Us. These poems attempt to yield moments of what I love and value most--rural Ohio life, my experiences with places and people in death and love--that have made me see my relationship with a world in which we are transient, passing through it from one place or time or person to another.

The Ohio poems attempt to make sense of a changing landscape and its people. The persona of the poems changes as she grows from a "Big Little Girl," alienated by her schoolmates, into the adolescent in "Mercer County" who recognizes the animal attraction between young men and "girls/ who all day butcher turkeys." Part of the persona's maturing process in "Muskrat Skins" is the discovery of guilt in her inaction to save an aged cat from death. The ritual of watching the brother skin muskrats has desensitized her to death although she can

watch this science of six dollars

a pelt and try to believe the cat died

well-loved.

It is hard to make sense

of this blood in all of us.

The poem "Flint" accepts human mortality and looks beyond an in­ dividual life to find some hope or solace in death. There is recognition of a forward-moving force that causes each consecutive generation to be "more pliant, less rooted." Other poems employ this death theme by showing a fascination with what happens after death. "Peonies" and "To Eat Sunflowers" both use flowers as receptacles and metaphors for spirits of the dead. Sunflower seeds "remind me/ of what they have been: skin, bones, eyes/ following the sun" and the spirits in stolen peony blossoms will

rise from the stems,

entwine from the fragrance.

As I sleep, whispy torsos float above my bed,

look at me, touch me,

breathe open my eyes.

"Subterranean Air" best shows the cycle which begins after death when the persona observes the remains of an Adena Indian from 500 B.C. and then the remains of her own neighbor. The poem projects than the same need to view the dead will exist in the future when farmers will discover the grave and "marvel at the fresh face drawn taut."

Experiences with death are balanced with poems about life situations that have opened the eyes of the persona. The rituals of Good Friday in "Stabat Mater" are seen as "memorized grief" when faith is too much grounded in artificial images of Jesus. Poems such as "Healing," "In a Haze of Pale Peach," and "Swallowing Stones" attempt to deal with the realization that romantic love is not what "love is famed to be" ("In a Haze of Pale Peach"). In "Swallowing Stones" there is hope that the persona, like a diplodocus dinosaur, will continue searching for the right stone and even "the sharp edges/ of the wrong ones I've swallowed/ will grind smooth." By the end of "Healing" the persona has survived the changes in her life "half healed, half whole, alive."

Though the persona cannot say "I Love You," as in "In a Haze of Pale Peach," she is able to show that love in other poems such as "Dawnlight" and "Crossing Over." The latter poem introduces another transience, that of crossing racial barriers:

He tells me how his brothers brand.

How barbaric I say.

My fingers feather the seams

over and over.

"In Sleep She Finds" also expresses great love through the persona's actions and combines the forms of transience gathered in this collection. The act of first feeling an unborn child move, of holding the child "to root her to me,/ to memorize her as she is, the same way/ I memorize a man's face in my hands" until she squirms in her sleep stretching for the lost boundary affirms the passage from one state of being to another. This transience forms an unending chain of living, loving, and dying.

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DOI

10.25777/9c6z-3867

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