Poem of the Week - Azara Feroz Sayed

Marilyn Vos Savant recommends one of the ways to increase our comprehension is to read a poem - reading the same poem many times to see how many different meanings, perspectives come out of it

I came across 'Poem of the Week' blog which will help me look at a poem for a week.
http://poem-of-the-week.blogspot.com/2008/04/excerpt-from-ghost-trio-by-linda-bierds.html

The blog has Johannan Wolfgang Goethe's banner "A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful implanted in the human soul.”

The poem below is from last week
The Winter by Linda Bierds
A little satin like wind at the door.
My mother slips past in great side hoops,
arced like the ears of elephants
on her head a goat-white wig,
on her cheek a dollop of mole

She has entered the evening,
and I her room with its hazel light.
Where her wig had rested is a leather head,
a stand, perfect in its shadow but carrying in fact,
where the face should be, a swath of door.

It cups in its skull-curved closure clay hair stays,
a pouch of wig talc that snows at random
and lends to the table a neck-shaped ring.

When I reach inside I am frosted,
my hand like a pond in winter,
pale fingers below of leaves or carp.

I have studied a painting from Holland,
where a village adjourns to a frozen river.
Skaters and sleighs, of course,
but ale tents, the musk of chestnuts,
someone thick on a chair with a lap robe.

I do not know what becomes of them when the flow revisits.
Or why they have moved from their warm hearthstones to settle there—
except that one step is a method of gliding,
the self for those moments weightless and preened as my leather companion.

And I do not know if the fish there have frozen,
or wait in some stasis like flowers.
Perhaps they are stunned by the strange heaven—
dotted with boot soles and chair legs
and are slumped on the mud-rich bottom—
waiting through time for a kind of shimmer,
an image perhaps, something known and familiar,
something rushing above in their own likeness,
silver and blade-thin at the rim of the world.

For a novice to poetry like me, whose knowledge of poetry is limited to school curiculum, using the reading guide and from the poetry foundation helped me appreciate the arcs of elephants, the snow, the pond
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/feature.guidebook.html?id=178020
Using the reading guide doesn't serves the purpose of improving comprehension and perspective as I am using the poetryfoundation author's perspective on the poem. I am assuming it is the fear of peotry as a medium which made it difficult for me to appreciate the poem and I should be able to get over it soon.

When we were getting to know each other Feroz would send me poems and it would be an embarassing situation as I would ask him to explain the poem. This eventually then reduced to discussing poems from school. Hopefully I should be doing without the reading guide some day and would be able to be a better poetry companion to Feroz.

Reading Guide: Linda Bierds by Averill Curdy
A boy’s mother goes out for the evening, and his vision of her as she leaves is otherworldly—elusive, estranged, alluring:

A little satin like wind at the door.
My mother slips past in great side hoops,
arced like the ears of elephants—
on her head a goat-white wig,
on her cheek a dollop of mole.

She has entered the evening, and I
her room with its hazel light.
But all of this remains hidden in the boy’s future. For now, he investigates his mother’s room:
Where her wig had rested is a leather head,
a stand, perfect in its shadow but
carrying in fact, where the face should be,
a swath of door. It cups in its skull-curved enclosure
clay hair stays, a pouch of wig talc
that snows at random and lends to the table a neck-shaped ring.

When I reach inside I am frosted,
my hand like a pond in winter, pale
fingers below of leaves or carp.
Here, another door opens. As he reaches inside the head-shaped wigstand, his gesture leads readers into his own imagination. He compares his powdered hand to a pond, his fingers to leaves or fish—all images, like those used earlier to describe his mother, associated with an animated, natural world opposed to hoopskirts and wigs
A happy accident of this kind occurs when the similes of the first stanzas lead him to the memory of the painting, enabling the imaginative leap of his poem’s conclusion.

Darwin’s comparisons of talc to snow, of his hand to a pond, allow him to reach the memory of the Dutch painting he once studied. The poem’s section closes with a splendid re-creation of the scene in the painting—a skating party on a frozen pond—proceeding to what the boy imagines lies beneath the surface, the fish “frozen, or . . . in some stasis / like flowers.” He wonders if
Perhaps they are stunned
by the strange heaven—dotted with
boot soles and chair legs—
and are slumped on the mud-rich bottom,
waiting through time for a kind of shimmer,
an image perhaps, something
known and familiar, something
rushing above their own likeness,
silver and blade-thin at the rim of the world.
“strange heaven,” of heaven as a human invention of “something known and familiar” in death