Underworld

Today marks day 1 in my daily poetry chronicles called Poetry in Motion. Each day I will select one poem of the day and include my comments, thoughts, questions, ideas, and other such things about it below. I adore and encourage feedback, so please, comment away!

Underworld

The new and towering boy in outpatient
folds the lavish scaffold of himself
into a smallish chair as though

it were an ongoing task
to account for all his parts,
and he takes us in,

nods his smudge of beard
and smiles privately.
We've confirmed his expectations

—no malice or irony in it,
simply a kind of sweetness.
He's failed to kill himself

last weekend, and has landed
intact, marveling, interested,
his legs (I want to spell long

with two n's, as Milton spelled
dim with a double m
to intensify the gloom of hell)

craning into one another
then pushing his knees forward
into the speaking circle

where we weigh
ninety minutes
the tonnage of our shame,

the damage yours
only until exactly spoken.
Whose pain's not a common one?

And then the new man—
all of 22—stretches
his legs entirely forward

and catches my breath
with the name printed across
the tongues of his shoes:

OSIRIS, in bold letters,
maybe a brand too newly stylish
for me to have registered,

but the unlaced word prays
for us to just the right god:
Him torn to pieces,

each bit of His ruin picked up
each nearly unrecognizable
attended carried and mourned

and is it loved or willed
back into place: the man and boy's
body radiantly restored.

Or that's the hope he's poking
out at us, with his excellent shoes,
while we go on talking until lunchtime.

-Mark Doty

Here, we are taken into a world of one male, a reflection of his life, a slow and painful reliving process. The poem begins describing an old man in a wheelchair - he smiles at us, knowing that he tried and cannot die. As he smiles, he pushes his legs forward with his knees and extends his young, born-again legs, attached to shoes with the name 'Osiris' on them. This is very sly play on words, as that word is both a shoe brand and also the name of the Egyptian god of the afterlife and underworld, the very title of this poem. I believe the author is trying to tell us that man is made in God's image, he both lives and is reborn, touching but never truly entering the afterlife. It seems as though this author is telling us that we never really die no matter how much we try, for we seem to live on forever in some shape or form, in spirit and in body, in a literal and figurative sense. The timely feel of this poem suggests that life is short, as we look at this man and his life quickly, as it's over before lunchtime.

Take life by the horns, kids. Live it for it goes by in a blink of an eye.