INTRO

Explication is a dangerous word, which is why I like it. It assumes a poem can be examined—that meaning is not vapor but construction. That choices were made. That effects have causes. The best explication is not demolition. It is inquiry. You don’t tear the work apart; you ask how it holds. When I use terms like architecture, pressure, or load-bearing, I do so because they describe something poems demonstrably do: they organize force. Images, line breaks, and repetitions are not decorative. Some elements carry more consequence than others. Some support the whole.

We have already looked at form—container, meter, prosody. Here I want to turn to narrative. Not plot in the narrow sense, but the movement of events and images over time. A single image—an attic, a basin, a church parking lot—can orient an entire poem. Repetition signals emphasis. Patterns accumulate. Tension gathers. Interpretation, in this sense, is not an afterthought. It is part of the work. Poems are built systems, even when built instinctively. The explicator arrives later and asks a practical question: what is doing the work here?

A strong reading distinguishes the essential from the incidental. Remove this element—does the poem change? Increase the strain—does it distort? Readers bring their own history to a text. The poem must withstand that encounter. The task, then, is to trace intention through consequence. To say plainly: this recurrence matters. This omission is meaningful. It is an argument, not a hedge. Often a reading reveals patterns the poet did not consciously track. Habit produces recurring hinges and familiar tonal shifts. Proximity obscures them. Distance clarifies. What follows are examples of method.

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CASE STUDY: SUMMER CAMP

When approaching a poem, I begin with the whole. I take in the tonal field, the governing atmosphere. Only after that initial absorption does closer inspection begin. With sonnets, the divisions assist us: quatrain by quatrain, then the couplet. The structure invites sequential attention. Consider Summer Camp. The title establishes an expectation of leisure and sanctioned play. The opening lines complicate that expectation:

  
We learned to stack a cord of wood by sound,
the wedge set where the log confessed its seam;
a single stroke would open it—a weakness found,
the grain split true along its rings.
  

Certain words establish the governing vocabulary: “confessed,” “seam,” “weakness,” “split.” The diction moves beyond carpentry. A seam marks a point of fracture; confession implies exposure. The lesson centers on identifying structural vulnerability. The effect depends on locating the fault line.

The second quatrain shifts from timber to flesh:

  
We learned to gut a snake, to coax the wet
machinery from its sleeve—the venom sac
a charm of sorts, an olive amulet
that dangled from its open neck.
  

Here again, exposure governs the action. “Gut” and “coax” combine force and intimacy. “Wet machinery” reduces life to mechanism. The venom sac becomes an object removed and handled. The pattern continues: interior structures are revealed and extracted.

The third quatrain extends the logic from organism to dwelling:

  
We learned to burn the vespid’s rooms,
we tilted gas into their paper keep—
a match, and all their architecture bloomed
then vanished in the heat.
  

The nest becomes “rooms,” a “keep,” an “architecture.” What is destroyed is habitation itself. Across the quatrains, the sequence escalates: locate the seam; expose the interior; dismantle the dwelling. The vocabulary of fracture and removal accumulates.

Then the couplet reframes the progression:

  
And then we learned to pray. Though no one said
why every word was balanced on the dead.
  

Prayer appears as culmination. It follows splitting, gutting, burning—not as contrast, but as extension. The line “every word was balanced on the dead” reclassifies what precedes it. Ritual speech rests upon prior violence. The poem does not declare this overtly; it allows the progression of actions to imply it.

The couplet becomes a skeleton key. Once read, it retroactively reorganizes the images that came before it. The poem can now be understood as a study in indoctrination: a curriculum in which sanctioned acts of fracture precede sanctioned speech. The earlier lessons—locating the seam, exploiting weakness, extracting the interior—begin to read not merely as rustic instruction but as rehearsal. The snake’s gutting suggests spiritual evisceration; the venom sac, removed and handled, evokes the circulation of poisonous language. What first appeared as physical labor reveals a psychic dimension.

This is what a clear volta accomplishes. It does not summarize; it compels re-reading. The turn does not explain the poem—it alters its terms. We return to the earlier images with a different interpretive pressure. Explication traces that pressure. It observes where the meaning shifts, and how the final lines redistribute the weight of what has already occurred. Explication, at its best, is disciplined attention to consequence.

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EXPLICATING LAKE EOLA RELATIVE TO THE SURFACE HOLDS

Sometimes, we understand meaning only in the context of the preceding body of work—one poem, or many. In Forms, we deconstructed Lake Eola, a mirrored sonnet, but to explore its narrative logic we have to acknowledge that it is, in effect, appended to the thesis of the preceding poem, The Surface Holds. These poems can be read independently, of course, but proximity alters interpretation. In painting, simultaneous contrast shifts the temperature of a color depending on what surrounds it; poems behave similarly. One poem can cool or heat another, sharpen its claims, or reveal its missing premise.

Here is the preceding poem, related in temperament and ontology:

  
The Surface Holds
  
The reeds give way. The footing turns to silt;
Cold takes the calves, the knee, the thighs.
The bank recedes; the center remains still.
A form goes under, circles multiply.
The surface splits, reforms. A clean design
of rings moves outward, thins, and disappears.
Above, the scattered light aligns—
no skew remains; no tremor perseveres.
A woman cleaves the sheen, a lucid cut;
the surface yields, then closes where it split.
Around her, freshened currents rut
what leaves her skin returns, unwrit.
If meaning asks for argument:
The surface holds. The rest is spent.
  

That final line—“The surface holds”—is not simply closure. It is a thesis statement about restoration: disturbance is absorbed, the visible field repairs itself, and what remains is the cost of that repair. The surface is both literal (water) and conceptual (order, composure, the world’s return to legibility). The poem establishes a governing logic: the environment can reconstitute itself so fully that evidence of rupture disappears.

Lake Eola takes that logic and stages it as a dialectic. Where The Surface Holds compresses thesis and consequence into one voice, Lake Eola externalizes the argument across two linked sonnets. The first movement reads like dispassionate tableau—third-person, panoramic, composed. The second re-enters the same space in reverse order, shifts into first person, and reveals what the surface’s restoration does to the witness. In other words, the “argument” of The Surface Holds becomes the structural engine of Lake Eola.

Before going further, here is the poem under discussion:

  
Lake Eola

I:
The fountains lift; the plastic geese fall out of time.
Still water brings them back in line again.
Wind lifts the hanging moss; the red gazebo shines
then settles back from view, half-hidden.
A weight shifts in the hedges’ shade,
then jackdaws break—a unison of black;
the sun is crossed, then instantly remade,
as if the air itself had folded back.
Across the lake, a bird suspends itself,
then drops, the water closes where it dived.
No shape returns—only the widening swell
of rings, the water’s surface misaligned.

II:
The water holds. I stand where something sank.
My breath comes late, as if it missed a cue.
The surface shines—a clean and polished blank,
and I am what it will not give to view.
The sky repairs itself. The birds unmake
their blackness, thinning into leaves.
I feel the air forget the cut it took;
my body keeps what light retrieves.
The moss parts; the red returns; the fountains rise.
The geese resume their harmless, hollow spin.
I take my place beside the watching eyes
and feel the surface closing in.
  

A mirrored or inverted sonnet has to manage its turns carefully. If the first sonnet resolves too cleanly, the second has no space to work; the sequence reads like two punchlines in a row. In a cycle, I often treat each sonnet as if it were a quatrain—modulating intensity across poems the way music modulates volume and tempo. The true volta, the decisive turn, arrives late, so the cycle can breathe.

In Lake Eola, the first sonnet does not “turn” so much as define a state:

  
No shape returns—only the widening swell
of rings, the water’s surface misaligned.
  

This is not resolution; it is diagnosis. The world is still intact, but something has shifted. The surface has registered disturbance without yielding explanation. The second sonnet begins by taking that state as premise and reversing it:

  
The water holds. I stand where something sank.
My breath comes late, as if it missed a cue.
  

The thesis returns first—now at the start, not the end. Then the speaker appears. We move from tableau to embodiment. The poem’s structural reversal becomes a narrative reversal: what was external observation becomes internal consequence.

Close Reading: The Second Sonnet’s Voice and Language

If the first sonnet of Lake Eola operates as environmental exposition, the second sonnet marks a structural and grammatical rupture. The most obvious shift is pronoun: the poem moves from third-person observation to first-person embodiment. This is not merely a change in perspective; it is a change in ontology.

The first sonnet reports phenomena. The second sonnet testifies.

  
The water holds. I stand where something sank.
  

The declarative assertion (“The water holds”) repeats the thesis of the preceding poem almost verbatim, but its placement now functions as counterpoint rather than closure. It is immediately followed by positional self-identification: “I stand.” The speaker enters as witness, but the phrase “where something sank” preserves anonymity. We are given event without object. The poem refuses narrative completion.

  
My breath comes late, as if it missed a cue.
  

This is the first physiological fracture. The metaphor of performance (“missed a cue”) introduces theatrical timing. The world has resumed its rhythm; the speaker’s body has not. The delay is somatic. The lag between environment and breath produces dissonance.

  
The surface shines—a clean and polished blank,
  

“Clean” and “polished” suggest restoration, but “blank” introduces negation. Blankness is not healing; it is erasure.

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Here, the speaker identifies himself as the withheld element. The surface denies reflection. The world’s repair produces invisibility. Notice the syntax: “I am what it will not give.” The speaker is grammatically subordinate to the surface’s volition. The water is agent; the speaker is what is withheld.

  
The sky repairs itself. The birds unmake
their blackness, thinning into leaves.
  

Repair and unmaking continue the language of reversal. The external world continues its cycle of transformation without residue.

  
I feel the air forget the cut it took;
my body keeps what light retrieves.
  

This pair crystallizes the poem’s argument: the air forgets; the body keeps. Forgetting and keeping form the dialectic. The poem refuses to specify what the “cut” ultimately was; the mechanism is emotional rather than expository.

The final quatrain returns the environmental images in reverse order—moss, red gazebo, fountains, geese. Restoration is complete. The cyclical mechanism is sealed.

  
I take my place beside the watching eyes
and feel the surface closing in.
  

The speaker reintegrates into the scene (“take my place”), but the reintegration is not neutral. The “watching eyes” make perception itself part of the machinery: the speaker is both unseen (“what it will not give to view”) and subject to scrutiny. The last line shifts from holding to enclosure. The surface no longer merely holds; it closes in. What began as a thesis of resilience becomes, by degrees, a thesis of containment.