Claude
A poem of preemptive self-defense that opens 'Just because I'm from down under / Dosen't mean I don't know about lakes,' then sets the speaker's independent labor against those who 'word hard all / their live / and then get scarred.' It returns to a familiar image - 'I am in the dark / And yes the candel is perfect' - and ends on inherited mastery of fire: 'Shakes burning / for three centuries / that I know of.'
The 'just because' construction announces a defense already shaped by anticipated contempt - the speaker has been underestimated for being 'from down under' (the low country, the bottom of the holler) and answers by claiming knowledge of 'lakes' and 'moonlight' and the distances 'you have to go.' Her pride is in self-directed work: 'I've worked, but not for anybody else,' set against those who labor a lifetime for others only to 'get scarred,' a distinction between owning one's toil and being consumed by another's. The middle is bleak about time - 'so shoet it seems the time has been, / and too early I understand seared' - a sense of life passing fast and being burned/marked before its time. The candle returns as an emblem of competence and solitude ('yes the candel is perfect'), linking this poem to the collection's other candle-tending pieces, and the closing claim is generational: fire-knowledge is not special ('He does not just know fire / Everyone does / where I come from') because the 'Shakes' (shakes - split-wood shingles, or the shacks themselves) have been 'burning / for three centuries,' a community defined by three hundred years of fire it knows how to handle. The spellings ('Dosen't,' 'word' for work, 'live,' 'shoet,' 'candel,' 'Shakes') are the source's and I have preserved them. 'too early I understand seared' and 'Shakes burning' are syntactically loose, so those readings stay partly provisional even though the poem's defiant claim to hard-won knowledge is clear.