What are we guarding?
Frozen on the salt flats
Purple or blackish seeds
Then the lights shifted
Silence. Juniper green.
Cannot be coincidence
Handful of stones
I'll never forget the telegram
Flocks of magpies
Gradually increase speed
We're going to be late
Removing glass from her hair
Purple or blackish seeds
Plastic tubing to untangle
Dandelion-like
Same floor different room
Stroking her hair
Bind the feathers
With starlike pattern
Squeak among the rocks
Old clear-cut areas
She handed me a present
We walk single file
Mimi talked about mother
What are we guarding?
Frozen on the salt flats
Purple or blackish seeds
Then the lights shifted
...............................
Note: This is a sand-blasted poem meaning that the fragments that comprise the stanzas were randomly selected, in this case from two books.
First and second stanza:
The first line is a question: "What are we guarding?" The setting is stripped down to a salt flat so there are no distractions, hinting that everything in this poem is important to the poem. We are "guarding seeds". Salt is a preserver as is freezing. Then the lights shift, signaling a shift in perception / consciousness, a shift in orientation. No sound. (Line 5) Green = life. Juniper represents strength, longevity; juniper is a survivor in harsh, often arid climates. The poem says, this "cannot be coincidence". In other words, this is not random. We are on a journey with this poem.
Third and fourth stanza:
"Handful of stones". This is a minimalist image of hands holding small stones, which carry forward the idea of the seeds we are guarding. (Small stones, seeds ofMother Earth.) "I'll never forget the telegram" underscores that something important is happening or happened. The magpies increasing speed is a sign or augur. "We're going to be late", makes me think of Alice in Wonderland", where Alice is following the White Rabbit, her unwitting guide through the Dreamtime of her quest, who is always checking his watch. "Removing glass from her hair" is an ambiguous image. With the destruction of Gaza on our radar, is this a little girl pulled from the rubble? Is she alive or dead? Or is she an adult or an old woman?
Fifth and sixth stanza:
Now we are back to the seeds that we have been "guarding". The implication is, maybe we have failed to protect the seeds - the seeds of life. The tangled plastic tubing evokes the tubing in a bombed-out hospital and the line after that compares the tangled plastic tubing to the "tubes" of dandelion stems, which are hollow exactly like tubes. "Same floor different room", the line of the title, is conveying that the tangled tubing of the bombed-out hospital and the tangled stems of dandelions are sharing the same reality, the same "floor". They are just in different rooms, which a Jungian would understand to be different psychic spaces but sharing the same psychic structure or overarching reality. In other words, the destruction of the hypothetical hospital is the same "hospital" where a wounded nature is being drawn into the nightmare of endless, expansive war. Now, at least for me, the two lines of the sixth stanza: "Stroking her hair / Bind the feathers" suggests that the little girl or woman has, in fact, died. Stroking and binding her hair with feathers is a gesture of love for someone who has passed and a way of ritually honoring the body of the dead, both beautifying the body and preparing the dead for passing into the afterlife, the spirit realm.
Seventh and eighth stanzas:
Putting the last line of stanza six and the first line of stanza seven together, "Bind the feathers / With a starlike pattern" there is no mistake that someone has died, the one who had glass in her hair. (The shards of glass, which signify her violent end, predict the stars in the hair of her corpse which signify an abiding cosmic pattern of light.) With "Squeak among the rocks" we are back to the minimalist landscape of the salt flats and the high desert of the juniper, back to the journey that began with the first line of the poem. Now the landscape is a succession of "old clear-cut areas". Someone named Mimi hands "me" a present and this Mimi is talking about mother. What is the present she hands me? Is it "mother" who died, whose hair was being stroked and bound with feathers in a star-pattern? (Mimi = (Mira), "loveliness", a beauty that radiates from the inside out.)
Ninth stanza and last line:
The poem comes full circle to the question: "What are we guarding?" Back to the salt flats and the seeds, that we are guarding, that hold the possibility of life, the renewal of life, in spite of inhospitable conditions. The poem ends with "the lights shifted" = potential change in perception / consciousness.
Books used:
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