Explication
Unaware of his loss until
a warm day when he wears
shorts above a black
titanium leg, I see
him step onto a field of poppies
or stumble upon a bomb
outside of Basra, a limb
blasted to bits. I try
not to look, but my eye
returns to the prosthesis beneath
his desk just as the snarling
saw in Frost’s “Out, Out—” leaps
from the boy’s grip. My student listens
as I read, his unflinching
eyes track the long lines. Others
gaze out the window
at dappled light, a breeze
stirring leaves. As I define
allusion, narrative, blank
verse, enjambment, the irony
of teaching a student without a leg
to explicate a poem about amputation
and death hits me. He circles words
in his text and jots marginalia, pale
companions to flesh
and bone—the alliteration of stove-length
sticks, supper, and sunset, the slant
rhyme of laugh, half, and off. What
does it mean to lose a limb
to a machine that cuts
a young life down
to planks? We home in on Frost’s
understated ending
and turn tissue-thin
pages to another poem
until our time is up.
Beth Copeland’s second poetry collection, Transcendental Telemarketer (BlazeVOX Books, 2012), was runner up in the North Carolina Poetry Council’s 2013 Oscar Arnold Young Award for North Carolina’s best book of poetry. Her first book, Traveling through Glass, received the 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award. She is retired from full-time teaching at Methodist University, where many of her students were veterans. She lives in a log cabin in North Carolina.
