"June, July, August. Every day, we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes."
In this final stanza, Oliver rapidly explains the passage of time. An entire summer is flavored by the laughter of her neighbor's children and grandchildren. They remain close to the house for this season. While summer is normally characterized by time spent outdoors with the family, this supposedly domestic scene hides a much more disturbing truth. Like the patient in his chair, the neighbors are biding their time. He's covering his eyes because he cannot bear to watch the outside world carry on as if it were the same when his own internal world can never be the same. Apparently Oliver recalls this painting because the conspicuous laughter and busyness of her neighbors so cleverly disguises the awful reason for their presence. They use fun to shield their proverbial sight from the impending death. But still, time progresses.
". . . and then the red sun,
which had been rising all the while anyway,
broke
clear of the trees and dropped its wild,
clawed light
over everything."
Once again, Oliver brings her poem to fruition with the final stanza which draws disparate pieces together into one harmonious, dynamic image. All at once, the rising sun holds both symbolic value and visual acuity over Oliver's recollection of this morning beside the waterfall. Because the sun rises after the discovery of the dead fawn, the contrast between beginning -- of day -- and ending -- of life, -- and the ancient sun versus the infant deer forms a sacred circle, a Daoist balance. In a more literal sense, the imagery of the bright red sun draws comparison to the blood hanging from the dog's muzzle. Just as the dog resembles a flower which the fawn also resembles, so does the sun resemble the dog. All at once there is a synthesis of hunter and prey so that the identities of both remain ambiguously open to interpretation. Finally Oliver describes the sunlight as "clawed," drawing upon an animalistic, even violent association. So, here, the sun has become the fulfillment of the previous relationship between deer and dog as the universal symbol of life but also, in this context, of death.
"A poem should always have birds in it.
Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings.
Rivers are pleasant, and of course trees.
A waterfall, or if that's not possible, a fountain
rising and falling.
A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem."
In the midst of a poem about an embarrassing moment in the Singapore airport bathroom, Oliver pauses to lighten the atmosphere. She breaks the illusion of the poem for a second, both a disturbing and reassuring action. For one, the reader is pulled immediately, without warning, out of the scene in the bathroom, just in time to process the woman's situation at the toilet. On the other hand, however, the sweet lines about pleasant images of nature offer a balm to the assault upon the reader's delicate social awareness. Oliver has evoked pity and fear in a single image of the woman bent beside the toilet bowl, yet she offers this proverbial olive branch -- a natural remedy to the shock of embarrassment. Finally, her concluding declaration about happiness in poetry reflects a gentle admission of her own awareness of the reader's discomfort. Oliver asserts her authorial authority in such a gentle, deprecating manner that she beckons the reader back into the scene in the bathroom out of sheer respect for the author's consideration and perhaps a touch of curiosity for the woman's plight.
"in the smudged moons of their faces,
a craziness we have so far no name for --
all this I read in the papers,
in the sunlight,
I read with my cold, sharp eyes."
Oliver contrasts the comfort of her home with the horror of the stories contained within the paper. While her present situation is one of warmth and light, her eyes -- the symbols of the mind's ability to empathize -- betray a much darker truth. By reading, she allows her eyes to intake the sensory information which is the reality of the lives of these war-torn people. The eyes then become the proverbial hand reaching out, across distance and culture and political values, to offer some consolation, yet the contrast between Oliver's world and theirs remains unequivocal. The "craziness" of shock and trauma in their faces is not the same as the keen detachment in Oliver's. Although she may empathize with the situation on a very real human level, she cannot by any means experience the true horror of war from the safety of her casual morning routine. And this recognition results in its own horror, which Oliver acknowledges in her medium of gathering information -- words on a page, -- reminiscent of the still further removed process of the poet evoking an elusive image or feeling.
