Letter from Brooklyn by Jacob Scheier

Author:Jacob Scheier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2013-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

EXPLAINING SONNET 73 TO THE ALIENS

Let’s call the speaker of this poem “you.”

You are speaking to me in metaphors,

which are kinds of lies.

You begin by telling me you are the season, autumn.

Well, you are the end

of autumn. More specifically, you are the leaves

that have changed colour and fallen

from a tree. Well, most of them have fallen.

You are the few leaves that haven’t fallen

in the tree limbs that shake in the wind.

You are trying to tell me

you feel old. Though it is worth mentioning

the leaves will grow back

in a year’s time. A year is not that long,

really. You want to be the trees, too.

You are the whole damn season.

You are the branches, you say,

and you are empty. Your limbs

are ruined choirs, because

the birds that sang on them are gone.

This alludes to monasteries, which were houses,

where men did little else

but eat, sleep, sing, and pray.

These houses were destroyed.

Though not by time.

But in a way by time.

A prayer is an asking of strength

and an asking that when that strength

doesn’t come, we are strong enough

to endure without it.

You compare yourself to when the sun sinks.

Even though many couples

enjoy spending this time together,

you turn it into a negative thing.

You think of nighttime as Death’s avatar

in the world of the living.

You say all this in a fairly precise rhythmic pattern.

It sounds like an old clock.

We seem to think we talk like the sound of time being measured.

Or how time used to sound

being measured.

There is also a scheme to rhyme.

The last words of certain lines sound

similar to the last words of other lines. I’m sorry,

that’s not a good explanation.

Rhyme is hard to define.

The dictionary says it’s when one word agrees with another,

terminally, which strikes me as a good definition

for a lot things.

For your final lie,

you tell me you are a fire going out.

You observe that fire extinguishes, once it burns,

everything it uses to sustain itself.

So your youth, you tell me, is no longer

the solid wood it once was.

You end by stating our fleeting presence here

causes us to love well, or at least

more stubbornly. This is said

in a couple of rhyming lines

which for poems like this are a kind of punch line

to a joke that isn’t supposed to be funny.

Jokes are like prayers.

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