Reading poems: Waiting for the Light to Change by Robert Hershon

On connections

Hello, it’s been a while. I haven’t been writing any poems since more than a month or so but I’ve been thinking about poems quite a bit, with my friends, here. Also, thinking about poets. How one poet may be connected to another. How one life maybe connected to another life. And so on. Today’s poem explores something similar.

WAITING FOR THE LIGHT TO CHANGE

Robert Hershon

I like those mixed nuts at Costco and I don’t
mind going so much if the checkout lines are short
and they’re supposed to be very good employers
but Wegman’s is supposed to be even better
but they’re not in the city, they’re in western
New York, which I know from our many trips
to Buffalo in our old Toyota and I don’t know
if I’d get another Toyota after all the recalls but
we won’t be going to Buffalo anymore anyway
because Myra Brook, of the sweet tooth and
contagious giggle, has died at the age of 88 and
now her ashes are buried in our backyard under
the bushes of yellow knockout roses
planted by Galen and her sturdy sons who were
accompanied by Atticus, age five, who rescued
the earthworms and put them in the box
that the ashes came in
And now the honking behind me
says the light has changed

I love how this poem is essentially a eulogy of sorts. And it starts in the most unexpected and mundane way, the speaker is thinking of the mixed nuts they get at Costco and then they’re thinking of the checkout lines, and then compare Costco (as employers?) to Wegmans. Random stuff. Daily stuff. And then they’re thinking of how Wegmans is not in the city but in a place in western New York, called Buffalo, and they know this because they have taken many trips to this place in their old Toyota and while they’re not sure if they’d buy the Toyota again but they sure will not be going to Buffalo again because…

Myra Brook has died. I love the long-winded route the poet takes to get to the heart of the matter. And this is how associations work, this is how the mind works. A certain place reminds you of a certain person who lives there. The place and the person get intertwined in a way that one reminds you of the other. I don’t know what it’s like for you but this is how I think of all the music all the people in my life have shared with me. The song they have shared becomes imprinted with their memory. Each time you hear that song in the air, you get reminded of who gave you that song. Same with places and people. Myra Brook is the reason the poet and his loved ones (I am assuming) go to Buffalo in their old Toyota. Myra Brook is Buffalo. Buffalo is Myra Brook.

I love how the poet describes this person as ‘of the sweet tooth and contagious giggle’, I also love how he just sort of ambushes you with this line without warning. So far you think this poem is about mixed nuts, or stores, or Toyotas, but no, bam! Myra Brook has died. I like the way in which this line is delivered to us, and how it doesn’t keep going on and on about how wonderful this person was but gives it three lines maximum and keeps going on.

I also love how the poem doesn’t end there. The ashes are buried in the speaker’s backyard under ‘bushes of yellow knockout roses’ which were planted by someone called ‘Galen’ and ‘her sturdy sons’, who were, in turn, accompanied by a child called Atticus, aged five, who reused the box that the ashes came in to rescue and put earthworms in it - I love this string of connections. To some, this might seem like extra information the poem doesn’t need. But everything is related to everything else, isn’t it? And everyone is related to everyone, in ways distant or close. And this is what I meant in the beginning of this post. How one thing is connected to another thing, and one thing reminds you of another, how everything is like a network of roots, of connections. I, for one, enjoy knowing who planted the yellow knockout roses. I enjoy knowing what happened to the box the ashes were carried in, how the box that carried something relatively final (ashes) got repurposed with something living (earthworms).

And I also love how the speaker then transports himself to the present moment with the cars honking behind him, how he lets us know he’s in a car, at some junction, waiting for the light of the traffic signal to change and how all this has been going through his mind in those few brief seconds or minutes. I also love how there is an actual exchange of form (ashes to earthworms, dying to living, old to young), an actual ‘change’, that has occurred in the last few lines, much like the changing of the signal light, or the larger spiritual idea of someone’s light going out and getting transferred or passed to another carrier, and how we spend time waiting for the light to change both during traffic and from death to life, and things keep changing this way from one form to another, and how this keeps the wheel turning. Something like that :)

PS: From what I gather, Myra Brook was Robert Hershon’s mother-in-law.