Poetry Monday: Quinnapoxet

Quinnapoxet

I was fishing in the abandoned reservoir

 back in Quinnapoxet, 

where the snapping turtles cruised

 and the bullheads swayed

 in their bower of tree-stumps,

 sleek as eels and pigeon-fat.

 One of the gashed my thumb

 with a flick of his razor fin

 when I yanked the barb

 out of his gullet.

 The sun hung its terrible coals

 over Buteau’s farm: I saw

 the treetops seething. 

 They came suddenly into view

 on the Indian road, 

evenly stepping 

past the apple orchard,

 commingling with the dust

 they raised, their cloud of being,

 against the dripping light

 looming larger and bolder.

 She was wearing a mourning bonnet

 and a wrap of shining taffeta.

 “Why don’t you write?” she cried

 from the folds of her veil. 

“We never hear from you.”

 I had nothing to say to her.

 But for him who walked behind her

 in his dark worsted suit,

 with his face averted

 as if to hide a scald,

 deep in his other life,

 I touched my forehead

 with my swollen thumb 

and splayed my fingers out— 

in deaf-mute country

 the sign for father.

-- Stanley Kunitz

 Artists of all kinds have mined their dreams: painters, poets, filmmakers, fictionists, choreographers, even songwriters (Paul McCartney got the melody for Yesterday from one dream, the idea and imagery for Let It Be from another.) Poet Stanley Kunitz has often incorporated his dreams but this poem is significant in that its actions entirely come from a dream, from the fishing to seeing his dead parents. The place is where he'd spent summers as a boy, but what happens is all from the dream. Of course, the language is the poet’s art.

 His father often appears in his poems, though Kunitz never knew him. His mother forbade even a photograph. The final action in the poem—touching the forehead and making the sign—came from the dream as well. But it was only later that Kunitz discovered what the gesture meant in a language for the deaf. Apparently, the dream already knew.

 Stanley Kunitz won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1959 and the National Book Award in 1995 for Passing Through: The Later Poems, one of the volumes in which this poem appears. He continued to write from the perspective of age for another decade. He died in 2006 at the age of 101.