Salvaged Parts

Today is one of those days where I just want to chill out.
Today the term has a more literal connotation than usual.
It is positively Antarctian outside. My freshly unwound scarf is still glistening with thawed droplets of lung steam. Sweet Lord, I felt like a nameless extra in the movie The March of The Penguins, as I plodded these ten blocks to Starbucks.
But now I am here, a large coffee in front of me, and you are about to become the victim of my musings upon a poem.
I read it for the umpteenth time, just before leaving the warmth of my house, and thought of it as I walked.
It is one of William Stafford’s profound little gems…

Salvaged Parts

Fire took the house. Black bricks
tell how it went. Wild roses
try to say it never happened.

A rock my foot pushed falls
for years down the cellar stairs….
No thanks, no home again for me –

Mine burned before it burned.
A rose pretends, but I always knew:
a rose pretends, a rock tells how it is.

-- © William Stafford --

Isn’t that a great poem?
I encourage you to think about it a bit, before reading on.
_____

Firstly, I think that the poem is not about a house fire.
There are several reasons why I think this, and the rest of my exposition will flesh this out.
Keep in mind, my interpretation is by no means the only one, much less the right one. That is the beauty of poetry. The thing may say something entirely different, to you.
But to me it is about the loss of relationship.

Looking at the first stanza, I see that something happened, and it happened suddenly.
This “something” was rapid and unforgiving. Quick as fire. And as devestating, taking all.
Black bricks / tell how it went. The present vantage point only allows a survey of damage. The former things…. hmmm, how can I say this? There are times when you would prefer something to be invisible, rather than have it appear to you in its remnant form.
What remains is so charred and disfigured that it is not only painful to look upon it, but painful to even turn in its direction while your eyes are closed. Sentimentality is displaced with revulsion. Or worse. Horror.
OK, the wild roses. They “try to say it never happened.”
He [and only for lack of of a genderless pronoun do I arbitrarily use this one] has since tried to do (and think) certain things to salvage something of redemptive value from the experience. Even more importantly, he is not the one that planted these roses. They are wild.
Life itself tried to bring equilibrium, tried to “liven up the landscape a bit” but all to no avail.
Roses are my favorite growing thing. We all know how beautiful they are. But even these of Stafford’s poem cannot undo what the “fire” has done.

A rock my foot pushed falls… I must stop with commenting, take a deep breath, and just ask you to speak [out loud] that portion of the sentence. The way it sounds, is exquisite. The only “hard” sound in the phrase is exactly where it should be. In the word “rock”… the “ck” sound. The rest of it is soft, even wistful. “Fff” – “sh” – “alls”.
Skillful choice of words. Exquisite, really.
What is he doing? Is he standing at the top of a literal staircase and sort of kicking a rock? Perhaps he is. This is entirely possible. But if he is doing this, he is doing so much MORE than this, when he does it.
The point I would make is that at a literal staircase, why would the rock fall “for years down the cellar stairs”?
Years?
That is quite the deep basement, I must say!
My take on it is that he acknowledges that he did something to cause a sort of catastrophe to take place.
He had an active role in it. He pushed it with his foot. And the damage was years in the making. It was the conclusion, the effect, that was sudden.
The next phrase had me a bit baffled, but like a penguin trekking across the ice, I persevered with it, and have managed to come up with an entirely spurious penguinish proposition.
No thanks, no home again for me –
Who is offering him something? Who is he speaking to?
I believe that he is offered something new, he is afforded an opportunity to start over, and he is declining the invitation.
Rebuilding?
No, [he says]... at least not yet.

We come to the last three lines. Again, if we are only discussing the chagrin felt by not replacing those dead batteries in the damn fire alarm, then what are we to make of someone saying [basically] “this place burned down long before it burned down.”
How can a house burn before it burns, unless we are talking about more than a HOUSE?
I think he is saying, “the relationship was over before it ended.”
Years in the making, our “home” was a heap of smoldering rags, waiting to ignite.
A rose pretends, but I always knew:
The bloom looked great for so long, but the dry manure at its roots… death was inevitable.
a rose pretends, a rock tells how it is.
God it tried so hard to be what it wanted to be, what it was meant to be.
_____

The “salvaged parts” [of the title] denote the character’s perception of the elements of himself that are left standing, and these are nothing more than “black bricks”.

Why use the imagery of a fire, and specifically, a house fire?
I think [not experientially, so this is merely unwarranted speculation on my part] that a housefire would be something that a person relives, time and time again.
“If I only had of done this,” OR “If I had only not left the fireplace grate open”… stuff like that.
Torment that is so horrid that it makes mere regret cringe behind a curtain!
That kind of hopeless “reliving” thing is something that comes across to me in this poem, and I believe it is part of what Stafford was going for.
Secondly, I posit that a housefire is employed metaphorically in this poem because of the fact that when fire does its work, it not only consumes everything burnable in its pathway, but it is never finished until it consumes even itself.
Much as the poem’s subject, in his own passionate way, is doing to himself.

There are probably another hundred ways of looking at this poem. 

Mine is by no means the only way.
Again, that is what makes poetry so much fun, in my opinion.

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