SAMPLE FOR FIRST POETRY PAPER                             

                            Facing Death so that We may Live Life

by Alicia Brewster

             "Smell My Fingers", by David Axelrod and "Traveling Through the Dark", by William Stafford both reflect their writer's belief that life is fragile, and oftentimes ugly, but that to shy away from these facts in fear of our own mortality is, though very human, to deprive ourselves of the chance to experience those gifts that life does offer us. In "Smell My Fingers", this lesson is impressed upon the speaker by his daughter who, too young to have confronted the specter of death, can, in her innocence, embrace her humanity as vigorously as her father tries to deny his. In "Traveling Through the Dark", the speaker seems to have already accepted these truths yet still battles a momentary rearing up of fear when called upon to act on them. In both we see how something precious would have been missed had the speaker succumbed to his fears, or, as in the case of the Axelrod poem, had the speaker not been forced to confront them.

            "Smell My Fingers" finds the speaker trying to evade the hands thrust at his nose with this appeal from his six year old daughter. Though most adults would feel a sense of trepidation at these words, particularly from a child, the speaker reacts dramatically, "I back dive off / my chair as if the air were / poisoned" (3-5). We get the impression of a man in mortal fear.   Horrified at the idea of  "six / years of sticky places" (6,7), the speaker runs from the hands that he thinks of as "germicidal weapons" (10). He seems to believe that evading these hands, with all of their potential for harboring disease and their accumulated scents of real life, will somehow help him to evade death. His daughter, still unencumbered by thoughts of mortality or inhibitions instilled by a society that tries to cleanse away or mask its every humanness, is undaunted by her father's reaction and pursues him, laughing, untroubled by his concerns for where her hands may have been. When he is finally caught, she reveals to him a pinecone and tells him, "it is spring and that means perfume" (14). The same hand that has most likely been up her nose, down her pants, picked food up off the floor, worms up out of the dirt, and the spit covered tennis ball out of her dog's mouth, is the same hand that holds springtime, with its promise of renewal, and the "perfume" of nature, a simple pleasure of life. We are shown that real life is not always neat and clean; our humanness opens us up to the potential for death, but that it is only by accepting life in all of its many facets that the potential exists for us to experience its joys.

            The speaker in "Traveling Through the Dark" seems, at the beginning of the poem, to have already made peace with these ideas. Confronted with a dead deer on the side of a highway, he is pragmatic about it. He feels that it would be best to roll it into the canyon to prevent a potential accident, "to swerve might make more dead"(4), and wastes no time proceeding to drag her off. He does not seem burdened by the ugliness of the deer's death; the fragility of its life does not, at once, weigh on him as an unwelcome reminder of his own mortality. This is life; he will do what must be done. As his fingers detect the warmth in her belly, he realizes that her unborn foal still lives within her. His senses heighten with the sudden rearing of that visceral fear that still remains within him, "Beside that mountain road I hesitated" (12). As he experiences more vividly the sensations of the moment, the purring of the car engine and the warmth and glare of the red exhaust, he is now confronted with real ugliness and loses his ability to remain unshaken by it. 

        Like the speaker back-diving off the chair in "Smell My Fingers" this speaker, for a moment, recoils from this confrontation with reality and death saying, "I thought hard for us all -my only swerving-" (17) We have already been told that to swerve would risk more death, but the idea of killing the unborn foal is enough to make the speaker contemplate alternatives. His fear of his own mortality is, it seems, not very far from the surface. His very human need to feel some power over death, to save the foal and believe that life  is good, almost makes him forget the lesson he has seemingly learned already. Life is not that pretty; the foal cannot reasonably be saved, things die; he will someday die; that is just the way it is. The wilderness listens on as he comes to appreciate the truth in this and carry on with what must be done. He pushes her into the river, extinguishing any hope for this particular foal. Yet, because the speaker was willing to confront his fears and the more unpleasant side of life, there at least existed the possibility of life for this foal, and the appreciation of life for this speaker. Had he just driven by the dead body, avoiding the ugliness like the speaker in "Smell" tries to do, other lives may have been lost and he would have lost the chance for an experience. Like the "germicidal weapons" which opened to reveal the promise of a pinecone, the unborn life of the foal within the stiffened corpse would not have been revealed to the speaker had he chosen not to stop and deal with what must be done. Under other circumstances he may have been able to save the foal. The possibility for what could be a very rich experience exists because he is open to both sides of life, even if there still lingers within him some dread of his own mortality.

            Both of these poems caution us about missing out on the experience of living while we seek to deny the most elemental fact of life. One cannot appreciate the awesomeness of a spring pinecone without ever having endured a barren winter. Allowing fear to develop into avoidance of all that threatens to make us face our vulnerability may or may not lead to a longer life, but it will certainly lead to a life devoid of those experiences which make it worth living.

                                               Works Cited

Axelrod, David B. "Smell My Fingers." A Dream of Feet. Cross-Cultural Press, 1976.

Stafford, William. "Traveling Through the Dark." The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems. Saint Paul : Graywolf Press, 1998.