For seventeen years, her breath in the house at night, puff, puff, like summer cumulus above her bed, and her scalp smelling of apricots --this being who had formed within me, squatted like a bright tree-frog in the dark, like an eohippus she had come out of history slowly, through me, into the daylight, I had the daily sight of her...
JA: The concept of being “locked in a little cedar box" (from “Satan
Says") strikes me as a very powerful metaphor. Could you talk a little about
what “the cedar box" represents for you?
SO: I don’t know what the cedar
box represents. I don’t think it represents a cedar box, I think it just is a
cedar box. Maybe we used to associate them (especially with painted scenes on
top) more with girls than boys; maybe such a box makes us think of bedrooms,
bureau-tops, things held in safekeeping--but I don’t think of the box in the
poem as a symbol. Now cedar, it’s a lovely smell, and it’s a preservative, and
it scares away moths, right? They don’t like to lay their eggs in the smell of
that rosin.
When I’m reading a poem--let’s say Gwendolyn Brooks, or
Seamus Heaney--I’m not looking for ideas so much as desiring to experience, in
the imagination, a life, an image of a life.
