If My Head Hurt A Hairs Foot - Analysis

A vow spoken in bruised, physical language

This poem reads like an oath made under extreme pressure: a speaker tries to protect love by turning pain into a set of fierce conditions and refusals. The opening is full of bodily hypotheticals that sound almost like self-commands: If my head hurt a hair's foot, Pack back the downed bone, let the bubbles jump out. Even breath becomes a dangerous object, an unpricked ball that might bump on a spout. The central claim emerging from this violence is that love cannot be coerced or rescued by force; the speaker would rather be harmed than participate in a falsified version of love: Sooner drop with the worm of the ropes round my throat than bully ill love.

The mind’s bravado: games, cockfights, hammers

Early on, the speaker tries to meet emotional chaos with aggressive energy, as if action could master feeling. The phrase All game phrases fit your ring of a cockfight makes language itself sound like a sport staged for injury, and the speaker answers with manic, impossible errands: comb the snared woods, dance on fountains, duck time. There is a swaggering promise to do anything before facing the real haunting: rush in a crouch the ghost with a hammer. The tone here is boastful but unstable, like someone performing courage to keep grief from gaining ground.

Sex, pregnancy, and a bed that turns into a cross

As the poem moves, the body stops being merely a site of pain and becomes a site of creation and consequence. The speaker’s monkey coming (a crude, self-disgusted phrase) is called cruel, and the answer is not romance but a command to be driven back to origin: Rage me back to the making house. The domestic images are not comforting; they are loaded with strain and threat. The bed is a cross place turns intimacy into a burdened, almost sacrificial location, and the closing of this section points toward gestation: leap nine thinning months. Tenderness is present, but it is entangled with guilt, fear, and the sense that bodies impose irreversible timelines.

The hinge-word: No. and the end of bargaining

The poem’s major turn is blunt and final: No. After all the conditional If statements and daredevil promises, the speaker stops negotiating with fate, God, or desire. Not even Christ's dazzling bed or a nacreous sleep would tempt a revision of what has happened: My dear would I change my tears or your iron head. The repeated none, none, none makes the refusal absolute: there is no escape clause, no alternate ending. The tension becomes stark: the speaker longs to protect my daughter or son, yet insists there is no route out of the coming suffering, even when all ponderous heaven's host of waters breaks.

Waking into a world of carrion and an infant forever unfree

After the turn, the poem shifts from ferocious striving to exhausted aftermath. The speaker wakes husked of gestures, with joy reduced to something hollowed and geological: my joy like a cave. The world the child enters is not a pastoral cradle but a place of anguish and carrion, and the infant is named forever unfree, as though birth itself is a sentence. The grief also has a social dimension: O my lost love bounced from a good home suggests rejection or displacement, a fall from safety into a harsher order. Even the dead press forward: The grain that hurries from the rim of the grave has a voice and a house, and the living are commanded into a posture of endurance: there and here you must couch and cry.

The hardest claim: love as inheritance of limits

The poem dares a bleak, challenging idea: that to love a child is to pass on not only life, but the world’s closures. When the speaker says Rest beyond choice, it is not serenity; it is resignation to an appointment made by dust and time. The lines No return and The grave and my calm body are shut deny reunion, and they deny the fantasy that the parent can follow the child back into safety. Even the city becomes an ocean of impediments, with waves of the fat streets opposed to the skeleton's thin ways. The contradiction that runs through the whole poem sharpens here: the speaker addresses my daughter or son with fierce care, yet can offer only truth about inevitability, not rescue from it.

An endless beginning that hurts as it opens

The final image holds two forces at once: closure and eruption. The grave is stone, shut against your coming, and yet the poem ends on a paradox: the endless beginning of prodigies suffers open. That phrase admits that birth is miraculous while refusing to romanticize it; the opening itself is pain. Across the poem, the speaker’s language keeps trying to build a shelter out of intensity, but what remains is a stripped-down, unsentimental devotion: not the promise of escape, but the promise to name what cannot be escaped, and to keep speaking to the beloved anyway.