Random Jottings Of An Old Man - Analysis

The intruder who is made of language

In Random Jottings of an Old Man, the stranger who gets let into the house doesn’t feel like a person so much as a force: a flood of scraps, slogans, and leftover talk that crowds out intimacy. The speaker begins with self-blame—Like a fool—as if the central mistake was granting entry to something that looks harmless but multiplies. What follows is a poem about how a life becomes unlivable when it’s overrun by fragments: notes, stories, public noise, even one’s own tired commentary. The jottings aren’t just clutter; they are a kind of occupancy that replaces the speaker’s private history with an alien, compulsive narration.

Domestic space turning into a spill zone

The poem’s first images make the invasion concrete and humiliatingly bodily. Where crepe-paper flowers used to be—cheap decoration, but still chosen—the jottings now overflowed the basin and spill into the water closet. That descent from flowers to plumbing matters: the home isn’t merely messy; it’s been downgraded from makeshift beauty to waste management. The intruder’s activity is oddly casual—he began dropping jottings—yet the effect is total saturation, as if the speaker’s inner space can no longer keep language in its place. The tone here is comic in its surfaces (the very word water closet has an old-fashioned primness) but it’s also disgusted and anxious, like someone watching their life become unclean without knowing how to stop it.

Apocalypse talk and the vacant doorframe

When the intruder finally speaks, he speaks in manic, mangled prophecy: a rendezvous with kelp, the paths of nature creeping to a corrugated tooth, a blitz of old stars. These phrases mimic meaningful announcement while refusing stable meaning; they are the sound of significance without the possibility of action. The speaker’s response is tellingly physical and passive: Something in me leaned into a vacant doorframe. Instead of confronting the talk, the speaker becomes a kind of stillness on the threshold, and the poem literally gives us a still life: bottles and a jar that once held cold cream. That detail is intimate—cold cream suggests nightly care, aging skin, private routines—yet it’s presented as an abandoned container, a relic. The tension sharpens when the speaker imagines what waiting will mean: he’ll want to eat us. The intruder isn’t only annoying; he is predatory, consuming the very pronoun us, the shared life the speaker once had.

The poem’s turn: from us to debris

The emotional hinge arrives with the blunt repetition: No more us. Suddenly the poem is not mainly about an eccentric visitor; it’s about the disappearance of companionship and the way shared time becomes a scene of aftermath. Morning is now among cups and shards, and even the small irritations of a lived-in relationship—sticky places on the railing—are mourned as evidence that someone was there. The memory that follows is tender and long-held: We held hands for years, watching palms move out into the harbor. That image has a slow, coastal calm, and its patience makes the present feel harsher. Even the household music bears the loss: The pianola never recovered. It’s an absurdly specific grief, but that’s why it hurts; the poem insists that bereavement can lodge in objects that cannot properly mourn.

False morning and the grin of relaxed meaning

After this collapse, the poem offers a new day—Today the air is bright again, fresh with pods—but the brightness doesn’t restore what’s gone. It feels like the kind of morning that arrives whether or not anyone can bear it. No one appears to publicly validate the loss either: No mourners were sighted. Into that emptiness, the intruder returns, now oddly genial: relaxed meaning in his grin. The phrase captures a key Ashbery-like cruelty: meaning is present, but it’s relaxed, uncommitted, smiling while refusing to be pinned down. He cudgeled and cajoled—a mix of violence and charm—and distracts with breezy stories like the one about a widow in the henhouse. Grief and threat are met with anecdote. The poem’s tone here is unsettledly social, like being trapped with someone who talks over everything serious until seriousness itself feels impolite.

Cleaning the counter, pocketing regret

The later stanzas imagine survival as a kind of aftermath labor: regrets have been pocketed, the counter wiped clean of terrible fingerprints. Regret becomes a small object you can carry; horror becomes a smudge you can scrub. Yet the poem doesn’t make that cleaning heroic—it’s just what you do when the house has been touched by something you can’t prosecute. The movement westward into sheepherding country reads like a pastoral escape, but it’s compromised at once: The ranchers won’t like it. Even refuge comes with social friction, permission grudgingly granted. The bleakest line in this section is almost tossed off: living closer to dying than insects drawn to the chiming and gleams of the cash register. That simile makes modern life a lure—bright, noisy, transactional—pulling small lives toward extinction while they mistake the shine for sustenance.

A sharpened question: who benefits from the jottings?

If waiting is what he wants, and waiting makes him want to eat us, then the intruder’s real power is not the jottings themselves but the way they reorganize time. They keep the speaker suspended between cleanup and panic, memory and distraction, never arriving at a clean ending. The poem quietly asks whether the fragments are “his” at all—or whether the speaker’s own mind, aging and lonely, has become the dropper of jottings, scattering half-meanings to avoid the full weight of No more us.

Spring’s wake and the waking windows

The ending gestures toward continuation without comfort: Other oaths, other options will follow in the wake of spring. Spring arrives not as renewal but as a wake—a trail behind a moving thing, or a funeral vigil. Then the poem widens into architecture and multitude: Millions of mullions waken and gesticulate to us. A mullion is a window-divider: a structure that breaks vision into panes. The final image suggests a world full of segmented seeing, countless little frames animating and waving, as if reality itself is made of partitions calling to the speaker. The last word restores us—not the old intimate couple, perhaps, but a new, fragile plural that includes the reader, the city, the living. Even so, it’s a plural addressed by windows, not people: a community of observers, awake, gesturing, separated by glass.