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Annotated by:
- Aull, Felice
- Date of entry: Dec-27-2001
- Last revised: Jul-10-2006
Summary
This is a poem that celebrates the divided self and disconnection. The speaker wonders whether his tendency to be scattered--to not "find out till tomorrow / what you felt today"--is natural, is in fact, "what makes our species great." Is this "dividedness" what allowed "surgeon Keats to find a perfect rhyme / wrist-deep in the disorder / of an open abdomen"? The poem ends with another kind of disconnectedness: a deliberate separation of self from "the whole world in unison" that is preparing itself for the onset of winter: "I have this strange conviction / that I am going to be born."
Primary Source
Donkey Gospel
Publisher
Graywolf
Place Published
Saint Paul, Minn.
Edition
1998
Commentary