Vetiver - Analysis

A world where time is both slow and suddenly broken

The poem’s central claim feels emotional rather than argumentative: time doesn’t simply pass; it recites, sheds, distills, and then abruptly fails in your grasp. From the first line, time is made physical and burdensome: Ages passed slowly like a load of hay. That simile isn’t airy or nostalgic—it’s heavy, scratchy, farm-labor slow. Yet the scene is also unnervingly staged, as if nature is performing: flowers recited their lines while pike stirred below, half-hidden. Time is presented as something both acted and watched, with the speaker standing near the edge of an explanation that never quite arrives.

Against that slow drift, objects suggest writing and memory: The pen was cool, and the staircase swept upward through fragmented garlands. It’s like moving into the past by climbing into decoration—festive remnants that have already broken. The phrase melancholy / Already distilled and stored in letters of the alphabet makes sadness feel prepackaged, as if language itself contains a prior grief the speaker can’t avoid inheriting.

The winter turn: sweetness, damage, and the body as evidence

The poem pivots at It would be time for winter now, and winter arrives with a strange double face. On one side are spun-sugar / Palaces, fragile and pretty; on the other are lines of care / At the mouth and pink smudges on the face. The body carries time as cosmetic residue and strain. Even the color name ashes of roses compresses the poem’s emotional logic: beauty burned down into a powdery remainder. Winter isn’t just a season; it’s a way the past becomes a tint on skin—visible, half-accidental, hard to explain.

Then comes one of the poem’s most disturbing measures of time: snakes and lizards shedding skins so that time can keep passing on like this. The cost of duration is constant abandonment of old selves. The image turns time into an ecological machine fueled by discarding. As the motion sinking deeper in the sand continues, the poem acts like it’s headed toward a tidy ending—the conclusion—but immediately undercuts that expectation.

“Came apart in the hand”: when change becomes injury

The hinge moment is blunt: It had all been working and then came apart in the hand. Whatever it is—plan, life story, a relationship, the speaker’s system for understanding—was apparently functional until the instant it wasn’t. The poem makes this breakdown feel involuntary and bodily: change is voiced and sharp / As a fishhook. That comparison matters because a fishhook isn’t clean pain; it catches, it won’t let go without tearing. The earlier pond with its pike returns here in a new register: the aquatic becomes throat-injury, as if the natural world’s quiet stirring has migrated into speech itself.

Even tears are both sincere and ornamental: decorative tears flowed into a basin called infinity. The contradiction bites: are the tears real grief, or a social display, or just the pretty excess that accompanies collapse? By naming infinity as a basin, the poem makes the limitless into a container—suggesting that even what feels endless might just be where overflow goes when there’s nowhere else.

Open gates and the eerie generosity of aftermath

After the break, the poem enters a post-crisis landscape where rules are suspended: There was no charge, the gates / Had been left open. It sounds utopian at first, but it also feels like abandonment: open gates can mean freedom, or it can mean nobody is guarding what mattered. The line Don’t follow—paired with you can have whatever it is—reads like a dismissal disguised as a gift. This is one of the poem’s key tensions: release looks like generosity, but it may also be a way of making separation final.

In a room off to the side, someone examines his youth and finds it dry and hollow, porous to the touch. Youth becomes an object that can’t nourish; it’s brittle, full of holes. That tactile detail echoes came apart in the hand: the past, once held as proof of meaning, won’t hold together. The speaker’s plea—O keep me with you—lands with extra urgency here, because it’s spoken in a world where even one’s own history feels empty when handled.

What if the outdoors unites—or erases?

The poem offers a conditional hope: unless the outdoors / Embraces both of us, unites us. But that hope is precarious because the outdoors isn’t a home; it’s an impersonal force. The next images suggest people quitting their crafts: birdcatchers put away twigs, and fishermen haul empty nets. These aren’t triumphant endings; they’re failed harvests, the cessation of pursuit. The world stops trying to capture what it wants—birds, fish, maybe even time—and that stopping could be peace or defeat.

Bonfire, crowd, and the fragile rescue of sound

The closing movement gathers an immense crowd / Around this bonfire, calling it a situation / That has come to mean us to us. Meaning here isn’t discovered; it’s socially produced, almost improvised out of shared proximity and heat. The final tenderness is quiet and odd: the crying / In the leaves is saved, preserved as the last silver drops. The poem doesn’t promise that grief ends—only that it can be held, briefly, as something small and shining. After all the shedding, tearing, and hollowness, the most the poem dares to offer is a salvaged remainder: not a cure, but a saved sound, a last moisture, a thin mercy.

A sharper question the poem forces

If the gates are open and there is no charge, why does Don’t follow feel so cold? The poem seems to ask whether the freedom offered after something collapses is truly liberating—or whether it’s simply what’s left when attachment has become too painful to keep.