Unfit

Where I went, after they were through
taking back the uniforms, breaking my heart,
was to Ohio, my parents' home,
with the crisp October air to soften
all that disgrace, the overarching sycamore
of the better-of-two roads into town
dusting me with leaf-scent and sun and a lack of gloom

and dropping palm-sized tokens onto the shoulders
of pedestrians, hero and outlier alike, raining
down a golden message: you can outlast anything.
My father said: You've shamed us. Everyone else
was weary of talk of war and the calamity
of Southeast Asia. There was sufficient shame
to go around; the pallbearers of another America

buried the best of themselves, went back to work
walking stiffly toward ruined futures loss builds,
by definition, as monument every day. I took
a job bending pipe until the blood raced again.
The ache of being futureless was freeing; I worked
16-hour shifts, all the overtime they'd give me,
until they laid the whole lot of us off that Christmas.

They said: We've got enough pipe for now. Merry
Christmas. And snow fell in wet-heavy handfuls
through sycamores wanting nothing, wishless,
or wanting only to be what they were, unbowed.
There's just so much bending you can do, it turns out.
As if anyone could be found fit for his life, could bend
to fit this life, fill it like a suit of clothes or uniform


by Roy Bentley

Copyright 1999 Roy Bentley
This poem may not be downloaded for reproduction
or reproduced in any manner.
Roy Bentley teaches at Denison University in Granville Ohio and is well-published in academic and American small press. Look for his inclusion in our forthcoming book, CAP CITY POETS: The Poets of Columbus, Their Lives & Personal Best.

________________________________________________


Trying on a poem. A note from Pudding House:

We're not going to analyze Roy Bentley's poem, "Unfit", for you. I am unfit to do so. It is posted as an example of a kind of poetry we look for because its language and structure enables the poem to work at many levels. These comments hardly begin to explore this effective piece of art.

What is working here? Nearly every word and very hard. In my writing workshops I hang the banner, "It All Depends On The Questions That You Ask!" I apply this to the making of a poem. But if this goes for the making of a poem, it certainly applies to the unpacking of the poem as well, onto the wall of your bungalow. Any poem that will be worthy of a great amount of time from you will stand up to its diagraming, as you did sentences back in 8th grade. And it will stand up to your attempt to use any one of various words to unlock the rest of the poem.

You can start by choosing any word and looking at its relationship to any other word in the poem. First look side to side from the vantage point of what appears to be an important term (and sometimes turn), then see if you can force a pun of it. Does it have many meanings? Can it apply differently to what comes after compared to what comes before?

Consider in this poem, "Unfit," by Roy Bentley, the word uniform for example. I enjoy using that word as though it were the end of a bright flashlight. Turn that word on and aim it toward a place in the poem such as "after they were through taking back [the uniforms,]..." and you primarily think of military uniforms, but in that line I am immediately prepared to consider what all "they're" taking back, and we can, even in the first two lines of the poem, start to ask what all it is Bentley could mean about "taking back" and what is "uniform." What about the previously almost-uniform acceptance, even near-worship, of "our men in uniform"? If I am the soldier, I am unpacking my baggage in a country where they've taken back the uniform thank you and glory for the soldier who "fought for his country." What a shock to a young man who grew up after World War II with all those notions. Trick on me; they've taken it back.

We might at the onset invite ourselves to consider meanings that even the poet hadn't intended and that may or may not be there. But you focus that flashlight, the word uniform, and continue through the poem. I'm thinking about the uniform disgrace of the Viet Nam war for one thing. The uniform dismissal of the soldiers who served, which is quite a different, even counter, thought and just as disturbing. I think of uniform policies, uniform benefits, you make the list.

I shine that light (the word "uniform") back on the title and think about what it is that doesn't fit and the title starts to work all through the poem and what this master poem crafter does not say, as well. What does Bentley leave you, the reader, to bring to the poem?

I think of the uniform use of sycamores (often named in connection with this) and other street trees in the seventies to wear bows, yellow ribbons, to bring our POWs home, and the eventual drooping and eventual state of being "unbowed" which plays with the possible homograph "unbowed" and probable first meaning of the word as it is applied here. Unbent. Even in the heavy snow. The unbending. Here I start to think about the intransigent stand of so many in society who deal with the aftermath of that emotional war. Whether protester or patriot.

And the soldier him/herself who doesn't find a place that lasts for long or adds much meaning? That is here to explore. My symbol system says if I were a soldier I'd moon the system, moon the military, moon the detractors of the military and maybe of that war--I'd bend over. As if to say "Kiss my Ass!" I am a pacifist and I can say that for the sake of this poem; I can get into a possible take on the persona in this poem.

Use the word uniform and shine it around in "Unfit." After you've done that for awhile, make a flashlight of the title itself. Unfit. What and who is unfit or feeling unfit? What all is it that doesn't fit? Make a list of all that does not fit in this scenario. Clothes, home, parents, work, the self in one's own life, but for crying out loud, "shame." In retrospect, the ordinary soldier is not the one whose body&being should fit into a suit of shame. There. This reader has made an assertion that the poet didn't come out and say. He brought me to that, or, I took myself that direction from this field of words growing here and me stumbling around at first in the dark, or in half-light. We begin every poem in the dark.

And look again. What isn't bowed to and who besides a sycamore tree isn't bowing? What is bowing a sign of? All this wandering around in a poem, a good poem, can give you multiple meanings, layers of experience, messages intended by the writer, and messages the writer had never intended (or at least not consciously) but that are as valid or as satisfying to explore.

Once a poem is published, the order of the words belongs to the poet through copyright. However, its various meanings belong to every one of its readers. It is in a sense no longer the poet's to say what it does and does not mean. What does this poem mean to you? I hope you decided much of that before you read my little essay here. Give yourself permission to respond down all the so-called wrong and right avenues. Wherever the words, which are only symbols for deeper meanings, take you, there you re-find yourself standing under one of those flashlights, a new example of reader. What if this poem isn't at all about anything I've explored? What harm have I done? I've taken a walk, I've done my own thinking, I've left it on the page to come back to again.

So here--what I have still not said about this poem is an infinite number of meanings and beings with it. Whether a poem is to BE or whether it is afterall to mean, it is your poem now. What care will you give to this great gift from Roy Bentley who made this poem now for you? Romance this stone.

--Jennifer Bosveld