She used to hustle juice in the
Sandpiper Bar, off Jefferson Bv.
Boise, Idaho: I want to punch you
in the middle of the afternoon, you
foolish town: as it came down,
ironically, she was the only one who
didn’t hurt my feelings: as if “feelings”
were of any consequence for whatever
was left in the ruins of these
unfortunate years.
When streets had been dynamited into
dust and rubble, everything seemed lost
as roads dead-ended up against dams.
Boise, Idaho: if you keep tearing yourself
apart this way, you will turn into a lacuna
in the teeth of the West.
The Bench district is a demolition of
tract home rape: flakes of cellophane,
potatochip bags and matchwrappers
in the river blot-out the friendless
disappearance: you lovely ruined river,
Penelope is the bridge: you hideous
Boise faces, Penelope is the plastic
surgeon to bring you back to beauty.
Although I never, before, thought of her
as something found above a burial ground,
she’s located in these regions of deserted
women: women discarded the same way
roadside picnickers abuse the
national landscape.
Boise, Idaho: you’d better be advised!
Penelope and I are ecologically balanced.
We have biodegradable tolerance.
Mountain Home, Idaho (1977}
From: Crosswalk Casserole
Summary
“YESTERDAY I SAW PENELOPE B” by Michael C. Ford is a poem centered on place and geography, love and relationships, mortality and loss. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
Analysis
Voice
A personal, first-person speaker combines recollection with direct emotional address.
Style and form
The poem is line-driven, compressed, first-person. The poem moves by accumulation: images, references, and tonal turns build on one another, so meaning emerges from their relationships as much as from narrative sequence.
Themes and imagery
Its strongest thematic currents include place and geography, love and relationships, mortality and loss, identity. Concrete images give those abstractions physical weight, while changes in diction and pace keep the poem from settling into a single emotional register.
Reading the poem
A productive way to read “YESTERDAY I SAW PENELOPE B” is to watch how its images change function as the poem progresses. Details that initially establish scene or memory become emotional evidence. The result is a poem whose argument is carried through association, rhythm, and image as much as through explicit statement.
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Source & rights
Source: Crosswalk Casserole (Lawn Gnome Publishing, First Edition, 2013)
Rights: © 2013 Lawn Gnome Publishing. All rights reserved.