Buttons

Sometimes when I look at my hands, the way
the blue veins bulge and the knuckles protrude a little,
I see my grandmother’s hands, and I remember the day
she slaughtered a chicken, the same day I found
a box of buttons hidden in the back porch cabinet.
There must have been thousands. I separated them
by size and color and stacked the piles against each other,
then knocked them down, and did it over and over.
It felt like hours before I looked up and saw my grandmother
standing in front of me, fingers spread on her
narrow hips, droplets of blood on her apron.

 Sometimes when I look at my hands,
I can still hear her cleaver strike the cutting board,
her buttons tumbling to the floor.

This is what I wrote to Nina in response to her poem:

I very much like the way this piece captures the times of the grandmother and the impressions of the young granddaughter. The death of the chicken and the tumbling of the button stacks bring alive the little girl’s efforts not to think about the slaughter and her inability not to think about it.

A little bit of editing and some changes in the line breaks will make this juxtaposition of slaughtering and buttons falling even more evocative. Breaking the first stanza into two stanzas will help the reader linger in the past memory. The white space between stanzas is a silence that “takes time” to read and allows the reader to enter the moment.

Rearranging line breaks to reduce the end-stopped lines from eight to five will speed up the reader’s eye in stanzas one and two, helping her to become immersed in the poet’s remembered moment. Having the remaining end-stopped lines at the bottom of the stanzas rather than throughout also builds the reader’s ability to stay in the moment as there are then definitive landings at the stanzas’ endings, further leading the reader pay attention to the girl in her moment. In the third stanza, each line can be end-stopped, slowing the reader down for the emotional climax of the poem, a climax that brings the reader back from the past to the present where the poem started.

I think describing the “droplets of blood” as “blood drops” or “drops of blood” will make the language of the poem more imitative of the harshness of the visual. In the last short stanza, trimming the words “still” and “her” will help keep the reader in the very moment of the poet’s youth rather than in the moment of the poet writing about the past:

Buttons

Sometimes when I look at my hands, the way
the veins bulge and the knuckles protrude a little, I see
my grandmother’s hands, and I remember the day
she slaughtered a chicken, the day I found a box of buttons,
thousands of them, hidden in the back porch cabinet.

I separated them by size and color and stacked
the piles against each other. It felt like hours before I
looked up and saw my grandmother standing in front of me,
fingers spread on her narrow hips, blood drops on her apron.

Sometimes when I look at my hands, I hear her cleaver
strike the cutting board, sound of buttons tumbling to the floor.

I enjoy this poem’s use of repetition with the phrase “the day” and the phrase “sometimes when I look at my hands.” “The day she slaughtered a chicken” followed by “the day I found a box of buttons” links these two events forever. The repetition of the “sometimes when I look at my hands” phrase that both introduces the poem’s opening sentence and its ending sentence lets us know we have traveled emotionally from one point–the hands resembling the grandmother’s hands– to another point–the hands bringing back the specific day when buttons tumbling to the floor couldn’t mask the sound of a cleaver striking a chicken’s neck on the cutting board. The poem captures the moment of having to allow the adult world to do what it will, of carrying the horror of a harsh moment forever. It implies, I think, that the speaker has never had to butcher a chicken as her grandmother did. And if she has had to, it would not have been with matter-of-factness.

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Small changes in poetry enhance the reader’s experience many fold.

One of my teacher’s, the poet Colleen McElroy, said that when she was writing prose it was as if she had entered a house and could explore all the rooms but when she was writing poetry, it was as if she was being forced to walk quickly down the hallway, without lingering and without entering the rooms. She had to report what she saw as she went by using only what she glanced inside the rooms as she passed. That glance into an experience has to be a skilled glance, a way of alighting on the right objects and colors and lighting to create lines that will evoke not only the landscape of a particular memory but the reason it is resonant and important.

Poetry brings us to the essence of our experiences with as few words as possible, but each has to be just the right one. All the right ones are here in Nina Soifer’s poem “Buttons.” Carving out unnecessary words and changing line breaks to both resemble that quick walk down the hall of memory and the way we linger there help create an experience for the reader. This is the work that is at the heart of the craft of poetry.

Here are three good books for studying the shape of poems:

Peter Meinke, The Shape of Poetry

Robert Fiske and Laura Cherry, Editors, Poem, Revised

Donald Hall, Crafting a Life in Essay, Story, Poem