What is Known

What is Known

 

                           for my brother Michael

 

the office            my desk         phone

ringing   our mother’s voice   the news

the office            my desk         phone ringing

our mother’s voice

the news in my hand   the office desk

phone ringing   mother’s voice in my hand

her voice in my hand ringing

our mother        her voice        the news

ringing   ringing

 

Elizabeth Austen

What is Known

Elizabeth Austen

what it means

 A woman answers the phone.  Her mother is calling to tell her her brother has died.  I’m not sure you can get all that from this poem alone, but I read the poem as part of Austen’s book, Every Dress a Decision, and poems about the death are interspersed so eventually a fuller picture emerges.   

 Shock, death, grief create gaps in our lives.  We don’t flow as we normally do.  We speak and think in stutter stops and in fragments.

 Death is so huge we cannot grasp it, so we grasp at tiny objects and sounds to ground ourselves.

why I like it

I’ve known about Austen for years because when I first came to Seattle, I took her workshop on reading poetry out loud—so helpful.  She was recently the Washington State poet laureate and taught a workshop I went to on making great titles.  All this has little to do with why I like this poem, but I just want to say, I like her whole book, Every Dress a Decision, and I just picked this poem.

 Love, death. . . poets struggle to write about the big topics without being redundant, boring, or cliché.  I think this poem does so. 

 craft

 Simple words, repetition, white space in the lines, lack of punctuation.  I mean, for heaven’s sake, this poem only has eight main words.  How is it possible to tell so much with so little?  The repetition reflects the speaker’s inability to find the words to talk about her brother’s death.  The white spaces hold all that she isn’t saying.  And the lack of punctuation reiterates that there is no control or closure over this moment.