I’m not sure what I would identify as the event occasioning Richard Greenfield’s poem, “Cenotaph: Salt Cedar and Shed.” Working from the title, I would set it on the unusual equation of a salt cedar and a cenotaph. Like the poet looks out of his window and there’s a salt cedar that has grown past a shed in his yard, so he describes it as “the salt cedar / wears the shed as a skirt.” If this were the poem’s occasion, I would expect this salt cedar / shed combination to be reconfigured as a cenotaph, or a memorial commemorating someone’s death. And while the poem does this, I don’t read it only as a kind of verbal bricolage, whose purpose is to reveal the cenotaph a reader wouldn’t normally have seen. Like, for instance, another of Greenfield’s poems in this issue of Oversound, “Cenotaph: Dandelion.” There the Dandelion-as-cenotaph serves as kind of poetic riffing device.
“Cenotaph: Salt Cedar and Shed” is a more sustained engagement with death and grieving. What about a person (or a cat) someone might really say they are grieving for? And what, really, is the symbolic language of a cenotaph? Is the cenotaph’s statement static? How, when someone has had the death of a loved one with them for so long, do they occupy grieving and death as time has passed? Death for Greenfield’s poems is like a steadfast presence. His first book, A Carnage in the Love Trees, reckons with the death of his father. His second book, Tracer, titles poems after the names of missile system. What death means, what the living person does with their life after someone’s death, these are questions Greenfield engages with in this poem. Surprisingly, he speaks of it through the death of his cat. Not that a person doesn’t experience loss at a pet’s death, but that compared to his own father’s death, or his friend’s father dying, it would seem the least affective to engage the poem with. And yet, it’s where the poet wonders aloud about what exactly he’s missing about the cat. “I am no closer / to her habits on the yardlife, or curled / into catness.” And, even further, does the poem recognizing this distance between himself and his dead cat serve as an “anti-transcendental” realization?
And just to continue the line of inquiry I started this reading with: Is this the poem’s occasion, then? Does this paradox of “poetry understanding death” result in the poem’s underlying complexit? The paradox consisting of poem-giving-space-for-the-poet-to-think-through-a-tragedy contradicting the fact that that space makes him see the the tragedy in a less significant light. It seems possible.
Though what I admire in Greenfield’s poem is how much more it endeavors to address. Like the symbolic language of a cenotaph existing on what the poem identifies as a “grief-plane.” Perhaps grieving and knowing of death and the implications of death could be compared to a salt cedar which has overgrown the dimensions of a backyard shed. Does the beginning of the poem offer this singular visual as a poetic image? Or a poetic symbol? And what distinguishes one from the other? I don’t have a definitive answer for anyone interested in a hard line that might differentiate symbol from image. I do feel the white plastic trash bag appearing in the salt cedar’s branch inclines me to read it more symbolically. Which, for me, means I’m more inclined to think of the tree as stand-in for a word. If I were reading it as an image, it would exist in tacit meaningfulness.
What I appreciate, though, is how Greenfield inhabits the poem with multiple purpose pulling at one another. The surprising recognition of this salt cedar as a cenotaph asserting something about actual death the reader wasn’t likely expecting. And then the poet recognizing for the reader how death can make someone unsure of how to respond. It’s like the salt cedar occupies this space between settled memorial (like a cenotaph) and spectacle (for the image of a salt cedar wearing a shed like a skirt).