Untitled ("I am going to get food stamps")

Poverty, animal imagery, and local geography mix here into a poem that sounds both resigned and defiantly rooted.

A poem that opens flatly on poverty - 'I am going to get food stamps' - immediately followed by the chilling appraisal 'And is he worth more dead or alive,' then moves through hawk-and-chicken imagery, a hidden 'electric cord,' and a final, hard-won contentment: 'It is not all that bad / There is Singers spring.'

The first two lines yoke survival to violence without transition: applying for food stamps and weighing a man's worth 'dead or alive' sit in the same plainspoken register, as if both were ordinary budgeting. The middle is rural and slightly surreal - 'Keeping the hawks out of the sky,' creatures that 'pretended to be chickens,' a painting 'of black and white and orange' at the moment 'the sun has left' at noon - a darkening even at midday. The wish 'Find me another holler / where the spriee are short' keeps the geography Appalachian, and the secret 'electric cord / all the way / from a bulb on the railroad' is a vivid image of jury-rigged, possibly stolen power, electricity smuggled from the rail line to a solitary dwelling. That theft of light underwrites the closing acceptance: 'So I am alone / but I know of where I am,' and the modest blessing of 'Singers spring' (a place-name that recurs in this sequence) is enough to make poverty livable. The spellings 'spriee' and 'holler' are the source's and I have preserved them.