Jorie Graham: San Sepolcro

     In this blue light I can take you there, snow having made me a world of bone seen through to. This is my house, my section of Etruscan wall, my neighbor's lemontrees, and, just below the lower church, the airplane factory. A rooster crows all day from mist outside the walls. There's milk on the air, ice on the oily lemonskins. How clean the mind is, holy grave. It is this girl by Piero della Francesca, unbuttoning her blue dress, her mantle of weather, to go into labor. Come, we can go in. It is before the birth of god. No one has risen yet to the museums, to the assembly line--bodies and wings--to the open air market. This is what the living do: go in. It's a long way. And the dress keeps opening from eternity to privacy, quickening. Inside, at the heart, is tragedy, the present moment forever stillborn, but going in, each breath is a button coming undone, something terribly nimble-fingered finding all of the stops.  - Jorie Graham
 

 

      My initial reaction to reading this poem was that, in the beginning, she basically set the scene of the poem and then goes into the story. I conceived that it was about a woman is giving birth but that the she is having complication or that the baby is a still born. I was surprised at the nature of the content of the poem. To me, it was aimed toward a more mature reader. There was not much informatioon on this poem on the internet. Leaving me to only infer more about this poem. Some symbols I noticed is, blue light, Etruscan, lemontrees, church, and the airplane factory. All of these represent seperate things. Since there was not much information on this poem, I cannot only infer what these symbols mean. I believe the theme that stands out the most, though, is the rooster. I say this because a rooster can represent so many things. It can represent the onset of something new, such as a day. It can also represent a signal, such as an alarm. I think that the rooster connects to the new life or beginning of the babies life, or a signal of distress of the complication of the pregnancy. I did find out that San Sepolcro is a city in Italy. I think that it is pretty safe to inferthat the poem takes place in this town in Italy. I also found out that a famous structure in Sansepolcro is a church. Which might be the church she is referring to in the poem.