Mary Ann Samyn's "Beneath Speech"

I really like Mary Ann Samyn's poem "Beneath Speech," which is contained in the thick packet of poems Matt gave to us quite a while ago. The first line hooks you right away: "--She lay very still, looking up at the undersides of words." At first, I thought this was very strange. I was thinking about words written out on the ceiling in block letters and turning my neck up and I was kind of stuck. But then I continued. I think sometimes with poetry we have to read all the way to the end before we start asking questions. Something that always kills me when I'm watching movies with my dad: whenever anything remotely vague happens and he is stuck for a second, he will start asking questions, "What was that?" "What just happened?" I find myself doing this a lot with poetry. But I have found it helps to read to the end; a good poet won't leave any stones unturned, no questions unanswered. Mary Ann Samyn adds clarity to "the undersides of words" phrase in the second stanza. "Pink was pink all the way through, like any organ might be,/plucked from the body and held quiet on a little tray--" Here I get an idea of where the poem is going. Something I learned in a linguistics class is the arbitrary nature of words, that is, there is no real correlation between the word and the thing in the world that it signifies. But when you really think about language some words just seem better tailored to the thing in the world they represent. I think, as Mary Ann Samyn writes ("Pink was pink all the way through") pink is a word that just seems like it represents the color somewhere between red and purple, and that match is perfect. On the flip side, I always thought the word "koozie" was a weird one; it sounds way to exotic for something to keep your hand warm when drinking a cold beer. I can't be sure, but I think this is the idea that Mary Ann Samyn is trying to get at in this poem (another example "Night was a starry dish."). I really like this poem because she does such a great job of intertwining a really cool, interesting idea about language wit striking images, "like any organ might be..."
*Michael McCune