Cape Kiwanda, South, Pastel, by John Cummings
The Prodigal Son Turns Back toward Home
My dreams are different now.
How cold upon my skin this farness is,
twisting like a garment full of dark.
A wind of edgewise objects
broken off from where they were.
Gales that misshape the shadows.
So, with one ear canted forward
I will lean my way toward home,
carrying all the things that fell away.
Every smallness, every distance.
Now, within the paging nights
I feel a stillness.
I see the quiet fires of the stars.
_______________
Patricia Nelson
Review by Paul Willis
The muted, interrupted voice of this poem perfectly mirrors the shamed self-awareness of the prodigal son in the very moment of changing his ways and turning back to his family. Given the title, the first line is a bit of a surprise: “My dreams are different now.” It is as if he can only examine not his conscience directly but the most remote part of his inner life, his dreams. But with the next pair of lines we return to his actual world—his cold skin, his farness from home, his whole being “twisting like a garment full of dark.” Marvelous image, that.
And next, elementally, “A wind of edgewise objects / broken off from where they were.” These lines describe the structure of the entire poem, as the speaking voice starts and stops, breaking itself into piecemeal utterances—for this is a poem full of unexpected periods. And, though the entire poem is iambic, lending a calm to the speaker’s new state, the lines are of varying length—now trimeter, now pentameter, now tetrameter. Even the length of the stanzas, steady at three lines each for the bulk of the poem, decays to just a single line at the end: “I see the quiet fires of the stars.”
In this poem of carefully managed diction, I find myself pausing on one word in particular, paging, in the preceding passage: “Now, within the paging nights / I feel a stillness.” I like the way that this strange adjective teases my mind, though I am not sure what is intended by it. I do not think the nights are paging the speaker in the way we would page someone on an intercom. Though somewhat fitting, that would seem anachronistic. Could the nights be turning like endless pages in a story, as day follows day in his miserable existence? And now, perhaps, he has turned the page to a better story.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
We have come out of the cave where we were forced to believe that the shadows moved and defined by the wind were the real thing. We have flown with Icarus in the cold, dark garment that is our knowledge, finding only more darkness and cold; we have fallen, sure, but we have flown nevertheless. Now we return, retracing our steps, following half-interestedly the trail of crumbs we dropped behind, echoes, mementos of every smallness, every distance from that ambition of freedom. How painful will it be to get used to the soft light of the cave again? Who will believe our stories, the presence of stars and other worlds, equally alive?
His eyes are still adjusting to the darkness, and it may take a while before they are. Wouldn’t he become a laughing-stock? Wouldn’t they say, “You have returned from your adventure up there with ruined eyes!” Would they not say that the ascent was a waste of time? And if they had the opportunity, do you supposed that they might raise their hands against him and kill this person who is trying to liberate them to a higher plane?” (From Plato, The Allegory of the Cave)
Review by J. S. Absher
The poem admirably succeeds in using synesthesia to capture the movement of the lost son turning towards home—the “cold [of distance] upon my skin,” the “twisting” of “a garment full of dark.” I love “a wind of edgewise objects / broken off from where they were,” as if the son finally realizes how his absence has damaged something he should have valued, and he has the task of returning “all the things that fell away.” But only “one ear [is] canted forward,” perhaps reflecting the exegeses of the parable suggesting that the son is not yet completely penitent.