What It's Not About

So I'll say this, realizing full well that I run the risk of sounding both completely obvious and like a conservative throwback - I love last lines of poems. When they land just right, twisting and turning your head around like a Christopher Nolan film, delivering that knockout punch that leaves you reeling... There's nothing like that. 


It sounds obvious because it's such a common device. Sometimes it seems like every poem in the world is trying to do that same thing. From Frost repeating "And miles to go before I sleep" to Eliot's "I do not think they will sing to me," it seems like you always want to strive for that. Nobody wants to go out with a whimper or fizzle, you save the good stuff for the end.


Still, it can be nearly impossible to pull of a good ending. (Just ask Stephen King and the many, many screenwriters who've adapted his books. Or, for that matter, the much-maligned M. Night Shyamalan.) Former Poet Laureate Kay Ryan kicks this down the stairs - without the last two lines, I wouldn't care. It's only after that KO that I realize the poem was never about a turtle. 


I guess that's obvious, as well. If I had to define poetry, I'd say that it's something that's not about what it's about. I think that's what we mean by "poetry in motion" or "pure poetry" as similes for athletic achievement, architectural grace or beauty in design. It's all the other things that crowd around in the margins and corners of the thing that is what it's REALLY about.


Now I'm not making any sense. Maybe this will make things clearer.

Turtle

Kay Ryan

Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
She can ill afford the chances she must take
In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging 
A packing-case places, and almost any slope
Defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
She’s often stuck up to the axle on her way
To something edible. With everything optimal,
She skirts the ditch which would convert
Her shell into a serving dish. She lives
Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
Will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
The sport of truly chastened things.