Elegy--Sofi Tzouanakis

How It Is

BY MAXINE W. KUMIN

Shall I say how it is in your clothes?

A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.   

The dog at the center of my life recognizes   

you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic.

In the left pocket, a hole.

In the right, a parking ticket

delivered up last August on Bay State Road.   

In my heart, a scatter like milkweed,

a flinging from the pods of the soul.

My skin presses your old outline.

It is hot and dry inside.

I think of the last day of your life,

old friend, how I would unwind it, paste   

it together in a different collage,

back from the death car idling in the garage,   

back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced,   

reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish   

into a ceremony of sandwich,

running the home movie backward to a space   

we could be easy in, a kitchen place

with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.

Dear friend, you have excited crowds

with your example. They swell

like wine bags, straining at your seams.   

I will be years gathering up our words,   

fishing out letters, snapshots, stains,

leaning my ribs against this durable cloth

to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.

Kumin is a poet referred to as the "Roberta Frost", due to her attention to New England rural life and her masterful control of emotional subjects--the order that a human can impose on the chaos of his emotions and the chaos of events. Her renowned style is represented well in the above poem, "How It Is". It's homely quality and composed style live up to her epithet well, but through the schooled writing readers are sobered by the raw melancholy of the elegy. The three classical elements--lament, praise, and solace--are all given fair representation in this poem on wearing the blue-collar jean jacket of someone who was deeply loved.

Lament begins this poem, the author stuck on past memories with the owner of the jean jacket. "In the right, a parking ticket delivered up last August on Bay State Road." They continue to reflect on the jacket, which retains the previous wearer's "old outline", among other old memories which prevent the author from moving on from the grief caused by the beloved owner of the jacket.

Praise comes to replace lament in the middle portion of the elegy. Our author romanticizes the jacket owner's actions, no matter their significance. The subject makes even "a ceremony of a sandwich" in the author's mind, speaking to the idealizing aspect of elegies. This " dear friend" of the author has excited crowds, making them "swell like wine bags" at the friend's example. The owner of the jacket was not only adored by the author, but also the community they were a part of. These words also hold contempt, though; the author's contempt for the people who pretend they understand the grief the author holds from this loss.

Solace sweeps over praise and finalizes the elegy. The author tells us that they will be "years gathering up our words"--piecing together the real memories of the friendship, possibly giving some closure to our grieving narrator. By the end, our narrator dons the "dumb blue blazer" as they did at the beginning, resentful of the wearer's passing, but accepting of its happening and embodying the qualities of the person passed through this weathered jacket.

In conclusion, "How It Is" is the first poem that I have read by Kumin, and it struck me particularly because here we see grief for a friend--for someone who had holes in her pockets, got parking tickets, and chatted over “vodka and ice in the kitchen”. This is a poem not for a literary myth or persona, but for a real person--a “Dear friend”--and it is this quality that I feel makes it most interesting and touching for me and other readers.