Summary
The first three lines of "The Leash" mention various forms of violence: the creation of bombs that cause fear, followed by a mass shooting in which automatic weapons are fired into a peaceful crowd. In lines 4-5 the poem gets a bit more abstract: the sky becomes a heavy, gaping, metal mouth ready to devour all of the dark feelings we can't talk about. Then the speaker asks: after all of this horror, "what's / left?"
Line 6 introduces a river that has been turned into orange acid by toxic waste from a coal mine. The speaker asks another question, wondering how it's possible not to let this tragedy destroy our faith in humanity. In lines 8-10 she talks about wanting to drink the toxic river, "like venom," either to save nature and/or to commit suicide. Then, she addresses the audience of the poem directly, telling the reader not to die.
Even when fish are dying, and the country (most likely the United States) feels like it's sinking into a pit of enmity and hate, the speaker asks if there isn't still "something singing" in the world—something beautiful. She admits in line 14 that she doesn't really know. But she tries to describe this beauty anyway, comparing the unlikely sound of a rusty garage door closing to the idea of an emotional wound closing.
In line 16, the speaker starts moving outside (and out of her dark thoughts) into the street to walk her dog and is amazed by how the dog always wants to charge into the street at dangerous, speeding pickup trucks. The dog loves the trucks, or thinks she does, and assumes they will love her back, even though they are large, loud machines and she is a small, soft, and enthusiastic animal. In line 24, the speaker saves the dog by tugging the leash back and admits in line 25 that she wants the dog to survive forever. She tells the dog not to die and the walk continues. Starlings (a type of songbird) are noisy and active overhead in lines 26-28, and it is starting to be winter, which the speaker compares to death approaching.
Returning to her own thoughts, the speaker wonders in lines 29-31 if all humans are perpetually throwing themselves at things that will destroy them because they are seeking love, and because time is moving so fast around them. In lines 31-33, the dog has returned to walking properly at the speaker's heels, and she wonders if they can continue that way until another truck comes and the dog once again tries to run after it.
Analysis
The first sentence of this poem, stretched across lines 1-6, establishes a dark and frightening tone. Words like "frantic," "unleashed," and "spray" make the lines themselves feel like a frantic spray of images that speed breathlessly into a question:
After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate-metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what's
left?
Several poetic and rhetorical devices are worth noting here. First, syntax: the word "After" introduces a lengthy dependent clause that lasts up until the final question in lines 5-6, leaving the reader suspended unstably in the dark imagery, waiting for the sentence to resolve. Limón uses a similar tactic in "Instructions for Not Giving Up" from The Carrying, which opens with the phrase "More than."
Line 1 also relies on hard-hitting alliteration: "birthing of bombs" and "forks of fear, / the frantic," such that the sounds of the words themselves evoke the explosions and weapons they describe.
Line 2 uses the word "unleashed"—conspicuous given the poem's title. Even though "The Leash" winds up referring mainly to the dog's tether, by the end of the poem it also becomes a metaphor for the self-restraint that holds us back from self-destruction. That the automatic weapons are "unleashed" hints that this wanton horror is what happens when we let go of that tether, that is, when we let go of our humanity and self-control.
Notably, these lines do not name any particular mass shooting, nor any particular bombing. The risk of this choice on Limón's part is that the lines might feel vague, but the benefit is that they are timeless, unbound to a particular news cycle. The dark images are as resonant in 2022 as they were in 2016. The "bombs" could refer to acts of domestic terrorism, terrorism abroad, drone strikes, or more. The "crowd holding hands" in line 3 could be anyone: concertgoers, worshippers in church, students in school, or more. Many of Limón's images intentionally leave the reader guessing: why are bombs being birthed? Why mention "forks"? Perhaps the poet claims that our country values bombs, which destroy life, more highly than those who create life by giving birth. (A theme not prominent in "The Leash," but recurring throughout The Carrying, is the speaker's infertility and wrestling with desire for motherhood). "[F]orks and fear" may indicate how domestic life gets entangled with destruction or may evoke the image of a school cafeteria, among many other possibilities. Limón trusts the reader to interpret this barrage of explosive images, knowing that there will be new tragic world events to associate with her lines.
The phrases "spray of bullets," "brute sky," and "slate-metal maw" are deeply inhuman and/or bestial, contrasted with the tender image of a "crowd holding hands." The sky is likened to a hungry, wide-mouthed beast, indicating that this brutality is so commonplace that it seems to rain randomly from the sky. (Interestingly, Limón repeats the threatening image of the "slate / sky" in her poem "Instructions for Not Giving Up.") In line 5 of "The Leash," the descriptions partially break down into abstraction: "the unsayable in each of us" may refer to how difficult it is to even describe these acts of senseless violence, and so this swirling cloud of fear and despair makes us want to be swallowed up.
By the time we get to the question, "what's / left," we may understandably feel battered and exhausted by the sights and sounds of these opening lines, and this highlights the desperation in the poem: what can possibly remain, after all this hurt?
The poem will have answers for us, but not quite yet. Lines 6-10 describe an equally unspecific and timeless tragedy, leading into yet another desperate question:
Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom?
The phrase "hidden nowhere river" is blatantly unspecific, indicating that this same pollution is happening in many rivers, everywhere, and in hidden places that might not even be receiving public attention. It's a singular "river," but stands for a much larger ecological crisis.
The question that follows is addressed in the second person to the reader, a technique that will continue in this poem and recurs across Limón's work. (See "How to Triumph Like a Girl," another Pushcart Prize-winning poem by Limón, where the speaker asks, "Don't you want to believe it?") The interrogative invites readers to join in the speaker's fear and makes her despair less lonely to admit. The self-sacrificial, suicidal urge to drink up all of the toxic water is simultaneously the speaker's and the reader's. This is the darkest moment of the poem: Limón's speaker must look openly into the void, facing her darkest feelings, in order to overcome them.
The speaker then builds on the second-person pronoun "you" by addressing the reader directly. Lines 10-14 continue:
Reader, I want to
say: Don't die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn't there still
something singing?
"Don't die" is said for the first of two times, an important milestone in the poem. In two words, the speaker acknowledges how dark the preceding lines got (to the point of wanting death) and rejects them with a bold command. Ada Limón writes often about the theme that surviving is always, to some extent, a choice. See her poem "Dead Stars": "We've come this far, survived this much. What / would happen if we decided to survive more?" That notion is central here, too: we can choose to turn away from despair and destruction.
The adjective "silvery" is working on several levels: it is the color of the fish, but silver is also a metal, hinting at the earlier metal images of guns and sky, as well as metal pollution in rivers that the fish may be consuming. Lastly, it may evoke value and preciousness: fish are valuable creatures that we cannot afford to lose.
Alliteration and assonance feature again with "crepitating crater of hatred," a harsh and percussive mouthful of /cr/, /tr/, and /at/ sounds. This technique echoes the bombs in line 1. However, lines 13-14 reclaim alliteration in a more hopeful way: "still / something singing?" This is the third and final question asked in the poem, and here the speaker starts to provide answers.
In lines 14-18, she admits her own uncertainty, but then moves into the world seeking these answers:
The truth is: I don't know.
But sometimes I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain
Again, it is a choice to survive and to "hear" the "singing" that makes life worth living. Sound plays an intriguing role: we might not think of "a rusted-over garage door" as a pleasant or healing sound. However, this discordant, grinding sound is similar to "crepitating" three lines prior (crepitation is the grinding sound of bone against bone), suggesting that "crepitating crater" was the wound opening. Now the speaker is closing that same wound, letting go of her political despair for a moment.
Limón makes sure to specify "living limbs," a deliberate contrast to all of the images of death so far in the poem, reminding herself that she is still alive.
She soon introduces another living being, her dog, in lines 18-23:
can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks breaknecking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she's sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
The word "marvel" is a refreshing change of emotion from the earlier tone of despair. It's an awe that's mixed with exasperation, as "goddamn" indicates: the speaker can't fully relate to her dog's mindless optimism. But it is still inspiring, even though these lines also set up a parallel to the self-destruction in lines 8-10. Unlike the speaker who contemplates death from despair, the dog almost kills herself out of joy. It's an ironic parallel, and two sides of the same coin: the dog is marvelous in her reckless enthusiasm and lack of "doubt," but the poem warns us that blindly ignoring danger is also not a safe way to live.
Threat lingers subtly in these lines. We get the hard /k/ consonance of "pickup trucks breaknecking," that last word for "speeding" also implying the literal image of a broken neck, and "the loud / roaring things" share some beast-like similarity with the "brute sky['s]... maw" in line 4.
On the bright side, triple /s/ alliteration returns in "soft small self" to echo "still / something singing." The dog is "alive" and a potent reminder of joy, even though the speaker has to save her from herself in the following lines 24-28:
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don't die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
These lines include the second repetition of "Don't die," a marker that connects back to the first. The speaker urges the dog, just like the reader, to resist self-destruction (whether from despair or reckless desire). These lines also grapple with temporality: the speaker says she wants the dog to live "forever," which is emotionally resonant even though physically impossible. It's a kind of too-bold claim akin to "I'll take it all" in Limón's "Instructions for Not Giving Up," but it effectively injects hope into the poem.
However, the following lines' word choice balances out the optimism of "forever." The "bit" in "a bit longer" is humble and limiting: it refers to the dog walk ending but can also be extrapolated to the speaker's time left with the dog on earth, which she knows (but doesn't want to acknowledge) could end at any time. The starlings' fevered motion echoes the speaker's urgent desire to hold on to life despite the approach of winter, i.e., death (see Quotes for a close reading of this image). This is the first time the poem explicitly mentions a "corpse," and it is metaphorical, but it resonates darkly with all of the real corpses of gun victims and fish that are alluded to earlier in the poem. Tragedy has not been removed completely from the poem or the world; the speaker is simply choosing to live despite it.
The word choice "little plot of earth" is also humbling, and perhaps echoes the threatening sky in line 4 yet again: if the sky full of bullets and bombs is monstrous, then the earth itself is "little" by comparison. Still, the setting is a dog walk so "this little plot of earth" is presumably the speaker's home or town, a fact that also brings comfort.
In its first twenty-eight lines, the poem has progressed dizzyingly through harrowing images of violence and the suicidal urge of despair, to the quotidian image of a dog walk and the dog's suicidal urge to love everything. Limón closes the poem in lines 29-33 by reflecting further on this self-destructive impulse, and a final image of how we might resist its call:
Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.
The first-person plural comes back for the first time since "the unsayable in each of us" [line 5]. This "we" might include the speaker and her dog, and also invites the Reader back into the poem.
The speaker identifies love as the thing we, like the dog, desire. Unlike the dog, we are aware of so much tragedy in the world, and we are aware of how temporary we are in "the speeding passage of time," all of which makes us crave love even more. This passage of time echoes "winter coming" and undercuts "I want her to survive forever" yet again.
But the speaker and her dog are enjoying a moment of harmony in line 32, walking together without succumbing to any self-destructive impulses. So, the speaker invites the readers (through the implication of "we") to join in that peace, even though the very last line reminds us to be prepared for the next "truck," the next hardship, tragedy, or bad news.
A secondary possible interpretation of the final line is that "truck," when read alongside the mass shootings in lines 2-3, also calls to mind the rising trend of mass killings done by ramming vehicles into crowds. Whether that was intentional or not, the truck remains an image of threat to the dog's life at the very least, and so the poem ends with horror and survival coexisting hand-in-hand.
