After a Death

After a Death
Roo Borson

Seeing that there’s no other way,
I turn his absence into a chair.
I can sit in it,
gaze out through the window.
I can do what I do best
and then go out into the world.
And I can return then with my useless love,
to rest,
because the chair is there.

This poem struck me because of its simplicity.

First, to speculate:

The poem is about emptiness. The speaker captures a moment of emptiness while resisting the urge to turn it into something else, to dress it up in some fashion, really, to interpret it. She doesn't look for a source of hope, or a reason, or someone to blame in response to her loved one's absence. Instead she simply regards her own feeling of love, which has no object because the person she loves is gone.

It's hard to get a handle on death. You want to address it. You want to make sense of it. Maybe the speaker is saying that in terms of dealing with absence, all responses are equal because you're not going to understand it anyway. You can't approach it. Absence is like the concept of nothing. It's too abstract. It doesn't stand up to examination. What you can do is look at something concrete, like a chair---and that feels so unsatisfactory as a response. But I think the speaker is getting at something when she sustains that response for the length of the poem. There is a weird kind of power in that.

In terms of structure, there are a lot of line breaks, commas, and periods, which create silences. The sentences themselves are declarative and direct and so add to the impact of the silences. The repetition of the phrase, "I can" highlights the speaker's feeling of uselessness; when she gets to the last one, you feel that she's exhausted her entire list of "I can"s, like she's run out of options to enumerate.