Contributor’s Marginalia: Julie Hanson responding to Stephanie Staab’s “Safety Coffin”

I engaged with “Safety Coffin” through the entryway of humor, quietly so while reading stanza one, but probably with outright laughter upon completing stanza two. Why not begin there, then—with the question that won my heart most immediately? But first, the set-up. It’s important, I think, that the young grandson (the speaker’s nephew) is positioned in the back seat with his father where the driver (presumably the speaker, and, by extension, the rest of us) cannot swiftly see the boy’s expression just before and as he speaks. And, since that is what I yearned to do, I asked myself why. And I answered, “Because I knew how devoid of irony it must be. How innocent and unsuspecting. How beautiful and alive (so uneasy and so horrified—visualizing so graphically the literal separation of the grandfather’s body from his head.)” (But probably in fewer words!) (Later on, spending time on this, I briefly wondered if the fact that we won’t see the dead anymore is involved in this wish to see the child, his living expression and surprise. Or, that we shall someday be dead and likewise prevented from such privileges.)

But back to the stanza’s story in the immediacy of reading it: the speaker’s nephew, horrified about the apparent disassemblage of his Poppo’s body (done by the living, no less(!)—the loved ones themselves—not the slow and natural deterioration death might have done all on its own if left to its business, for his question arises in response to his father’s attempt to ready him, gently explaining the cultural norms of what we do with the remains of our dead: the case called a casket, the body, etc.. And then, how magically this all works!—the boy’s response acting as the punchline of a joke, bringing us quickly, unthinkingly, to laughter. And then. And then: we find that it is not the young’n here who is showing inadequate solemnity for the recently deceased; we find it is ourselves, the readers. And it happened so fast, we feel the twinge, the wrongness, only by delay, coming to us in a late-arriving wave. Humor!—how does it give the feel of being so lightweight? Here’s a secret: I don’t want to die! Death is a serious matter, a reminder of my mortality, and this is a comic poem. Surely one component of the fine poetic tension of this piece.

Like the others, the second stanza packs extra power at the end, in this case as the punchline of that stanza’s “little story,” and it’s what made me love the poem from the get-go. I loved it so much, in fact, that I was tempted to share just that part of the poem with family and friends, bypassing all the rest of the wealth of this poem. In fact, I think I may have done so a few times, and if I did, I know that it surely was enjoyed just for itself. But let’s hope that I did not. For to do so would have been, just as I have said, to bypass all the rest of the wealth of this poem. And more, it would have been to divest that portion itself of a good part of its wealth. Much contributes to it.

These four stanzas might have been, but aren’t, to my thinking, about grieving; they are about the stubborn and unwanted fact of our mortality, the desire for comfort and cushioning against that bony truth that lands us repeatedly and without a real fix into humbling predicaments that give poignant testimony to our capacity for denial.¹ Although all four stanzas do share the content of the recent death of one man, the speaker’s father, and although they are—a little like the couplets of a ghazal—discrete as approaches to that subject matter, each a little story involving various family members, their actions, words and interior responses to the fact of his death, we see no sodden handkerchiefs. Structurally the four stanzas share a formal strategy: the short sentence finish, a sentence more immediate, more troublesome to digest, than those preceding it. And this sentence stands apart somehow, somewhat distanced or detached from the story it serves to complete:

“Mollified, even in death.”
“My nephew, panicked: ‘Okay, but what did you do with his head?'”
“A strange reassurance, an icy ease.”
“The mind does the suffering for you.”

About the prose poem Charles Simic has written, “On the one hand, there’s the lyric’s wish to make the time stop around an image, and on the other hand, one wants to tell a little story. The aim, as in a poem written in lines, is to arouse in the reader an unconquerable desire to reread what he or she has just read.” In the instance of “Safety Coffin,” I nod to that definition, and recognize a kinship, too, with the haibun, a prose poem form which I have so far experienced as a block of text with a haiku-like tail dropped a ways below and often presented in a single line of text. It is in this final line of the haibun that the greatest compression and poetic tension occurs. It is also within this line that most of our rethinking begins, where we are given something to wrestle or reckon with: a postscript, a summation, a “last word,” a puzzling and parallel train of thought, a twist, a turn, a comic note. Although “Safety Coffin” doesn’t replicate the look of a haibun, to me it resembles one operationally, both in a whole poem sense (due to the slightly shorter length and greater pithiness of that final stanza) as well as stanza by stanza, where in each case the stanza’s closing sentence tends to be shorter than the ones preceding, more succinct, more prone to (I’ll call it) crypticism than the content that has come before.

Look, I know all of you are smart; I’ve read your poems. And I’m not at all sure that my mulling over these perplexing closures comes to anything illuminating enough to share, but I have certainly enjoyed writing down the notes I produced in order to A. impress you, and B. satisfy myself, one sheet of which has blown to the floorboards where possibly the rest of them belong. It doesn’t matter. This essay has gone on long enough. I’ll leave you a couple of the sets of questions that popped up as I wrestled with those sentences of closure and the little stories of their stanzas.

1. I wonder, does the dream in stanza one represent something continuous with reality for the speaker, or a discontinuity? (For example: is the fury displayed by her dream father “in character” with the man she knows, or is the dream father acting “out of character?” With dreams, either can commonly be the case, it seems to me, and what is noteworthy to the dreamer is the fact of discontinuity or continuity with her understanding of the reality—don’t you think?) (A restatement or variation of the same: In death, would it be likely for the father to feel misunderstood, misinterpreted, and/or to be a bit infuriated by the assumptions of others, or would it be totally out of character for him to be so? Either way, I don’t think readers have the evidence to determine what may be the case here, but the question interests me. What is the business dreams have in mind by making it seem a matter of import?—consistencies and inconsistencies, continuities and discontinuities? The whole notion of death and continuity after death and discontinuities after death is important to us and has been through time and across cultures. And of course, that the dead, in having died, are forfeit of control pulls on us with plaintive chords.

2. Who is the subject of “Mollified, even in death”? There’s Dad of course. But even though she is not the one dead, might the speaker’s mother be seen, within this time frame, preoccupied as she is, as abiding for a while “in death?” What does making him “comfy” do for her?

3. A strange reassurance, an icy ease. Exactly who is reassured, albeit icily? That is, who does the idea of safety coffins work on, in terms of its providing comfort?

4. Was it intentional on the part of the author for all of these stunning closures to be, in one sense or another, without a subject? Or, okay, in one case to entertain, by joyful error, decapitation, if not subjectless-ness, and, in another, to separate mind from body? When the subject, I’ll remind you, is mortality, the loss of what we know to be ourselves? If not, Stephanie Staab has clearly learned to know when to trust the skilled unconscious of her writing mind.


^[1] I’ve chosen to refer to the text units here as stanzas even though they may more properly be called paragraphs in a prose poem, because here those units seem to me so much like separate rooms.