Mare and Newborn Foal

When you die
there are bales of hay
heaped high in space
mean while
with my tongue
I draw the black straw
out of you
mean while
with your tongue
you draw the black straw out of me

--Jean Valentine

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The last seven lines of this poem are incredible.

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Let me explain, I guess: The last seven lines are incredibly, strangely impossible without seeming so. What does it mean to draw black straw out of a body with one's tongue? What does that look like, and what does that signify? Yet the speaker's voice and the action expressed seem wholly natural. I can imagine it; there is no difficulty (and if there is a little, it is a pleasant difficulty). This is in part because it is clear that the inspiration for such an image is, simply, the familiar scene of a mare licking her foal (and the tenderness of that), so there is an accessible frame of reference. Yet not one other reader will imagine "draw the black straw out of you" the same way as another; it opens the poem up to a range of imagistic and metaphorical interpretations, which makes the poem feel alive and complex (at least for me, the kind of reader who prefers that a poem not place boundaries upon my understanding of it). To use a silly metaphor, I really do think a poem needs a significant amount of dark matter to succeed as more than just a passing thought or heap of language. There needs to be something dark and impenetrable and mysterious between the words that holds them together, some unquantifiable substance that prevents the poem from being completely understood and explained away, thus allowing the poem to be a realm of infinite discovery. The image of a mare and a foal "drawing" the "black straw" out of one another with their tongues is one (for me) that gains a certain amount of weight in its darkness and mystery. It is one to which I could return again and again, with different eyes, and find something new. One might argue that the image has no point, that it is a reluctant one, that ending on enigma stunts rather than opens up the poem. I suppose it depends on the kind of reader you are or would like to be.