Sticking the Dismount
On Poem Endings with lines from Olzmann and Huey
One of the first poem endings I fell in love with was the closing couplet of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. After twelve lines of explaining what real love is and isn’t, the sonnet ends with the couplet “If this be error, and upon me prov’d, I never writ and no man ever loved.” It’s a mic drop. It’s the brashness to say that everything he has asserted in the poem is absolutely true. That’s bold. And I love it.
Ending a poem can be difficult. One impulse is to get didactic at the end, make sure the reader knows what point you are trying to make. (A workshop leader I once had said that most people can chop off the last three to four lines of a poem, as that is where most poets try to “explain” their poem.)
Another impulse is to wrap up the poem with a “kicker,” with a “gotcha” or “aha” moment. Another is to tie the end back to the beginning or the title in some way, creating a loop. Yet another is to leave the poem’s concerns unresolved, letting the reader fill in the blanks. Each of these moves can be effective in a poem, if handled deftly. As with openings, there are no wrong ways to end a poem.
I’ll discuss two endings I love below, both of which have stuck with me long after my initial reading of the poems. First Matthew Olzmann’s “Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem.”
So here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage might work: Because you wear pink but write poems about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell at your keys when you lose them, and laugh, loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol, gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming. You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents of what you packed were written inside the boxes. Because you think swans are overrated and kind of stupid. Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence. Because you underline everything you read, and circle the things you think are important, and put stars next to the things you think I should think are important, and write notes in the margins about all the people you’re mad at and my name almost never appears there. Because you made that pork recipe you found in the Frida Kahlo Cookbook. Because when you read that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed over the windows, you still believe someone outside can see you. And one day five summers ago, when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments— there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew, which you paid for with your last damn dime because you once overheard me say that I liked it. Matthew Olzmann, “Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem” After a poem full of big and small reasons that a marriage "might work," Olzmann fulfills the promise of his title with this ending that is a perfect simple illustration of what it means to understand and love someone, to sacrifice your own needs for that person's joy. It shows the power of a single image to convey emotion. The second ending that I will share is from Amorak Huey's "We Were All Odysseus In Those Days." A young man learns to shoot & dies in the mud an ocean away from home, a rifle in his fingers & the sky dripping from his heart. Next to him a friend watches his final breath slip ragged into the ditch, a thing the friend will carry back to America— wound, souvenir, backstory. He’ll teach literature to young people for 40 years. He’ll coach his daughters’ softball teams. Root for Red Wings & Lions & Tigers. Dance well. Love generously. He’ll be quick with a joke & firm with handshakes. He’ll rarely talk about the war. If asked he’ll tell you instead his favorite story: Odysseus escaping from the Cyclops with a bad pun & good wine & a sharp stick. It’s about buying time & making do, he’ll say. It’s about doing what it takes to get home, & you see he has been talking about the war all along. We all want the same thing from this world: Call me nobody. Let me live. Amorak Huey, "We Were All Odysseus in Those Days" Huey has long been a favorite poet of mine, partly due to his masterful poem endings, taking seemingly disparate elements of a piece and finding a way to pull them together in a way that resonates far beyond one reading. This poem is an ode to a man who lived a full life yet never talked about his war experience. He did have a favorite story: the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops. Although the language of the poem is straightforward, this is a complex poem ending in many ways. First, it tells the story of the Cyclops through the eyes of the poem's subject, a person who has only been talked about until now. That leads the the speaker's revelation, given in direct address to the reader just before the last lines above ("and you see, he has been talking about the war all along"). Then the ending, which echoes a crucial detail of Odysseus's escape from the Cyclops, resonates back to the subject's war experience and brings the reader and the speaker into the conversation as well about what it means to live.
so great