what i think when i ride the train
maybe my father
made these couplers.
his hands were hard
and black and swollen,
the knuckles like lugs
or bolts in a rich man’s box.
he broke a bone each year
as if on schedule.
when i read about a wreck,
how the cars buckle
together or hang from the track
in a chain, but never separate,
i think; see,
there’s my father,
he was a chipper,
he made the best damn couplers
in the whole white world.
***
Hi friends,
Today’s poem comes from Lucille Clifton‘s Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000.
As you have probably inferred from the poem, a “coupler” — also called a “coupling” — is the mechanism that holds two railway cars together. One meaning of “knuckle” is the round nob-like piece of a coupler. The role of a “chipper” in a steel mill focuses on seems and joints — hammering, cutting, chipping, splitting, filing, fine-tuning angles; “chipper” is also slang for an occasional narcotics user.
Since you are reading this poem in isolation from Clifton’s larger body of work, I would also consider myself remiss if I left you thinking that she had a wonderful, perfect relationship with her father and always viewed him in a nostalgic, idealized light. Many of Clifton’s other poems explore a more complex and painful relationship with her father, who, among other things, sexually abused her as a child.
Does that biographical information change how you read this poem, in particular the description of her father’s hands? Should biographical information change how one reads a poem?
Best,
Ellen
Correction Note: The initial poem-a-day email for April 2, 2008 contained by far my most embarrassing error in Poem-a-Day history. It incorrectly stated this poem could be found in a collection “published in 2000, the year of her death.” Lucille Clifton is still alive. I am so very sorry and so very embarrassed. I don’t know what else to say at the moment. How does one apologize for mistaking someone for dead?