Week #1--Sign Inventory

Sign Inventory for Henri Cole’s “Harvard Classics”

It is the hour of the lamps.

On our knees my mother

and I, still young, color

with crayons threadbare nap

on the livingroom rug.

Though there is no money,

no one seems to care. We

are self-possessed as bugs

waving their antennae

Through cracks in the kitchen’s

Linoleum floor. When

Father begins to read

from the red gilt volume

in his lap, a circle

of light encapsulates

us like hearts in a womb.

Except their marriage is

already dead. I know

this though I’m only six.

So we visit Pharoahs;

a boatman on the Nile,

Crusaders eating grapes

on a beach. Life escapes

With all its sadness while

Two tragic Greek poets

inhabit Father’s voice.

Who’d know I’m just a boy

when he begins a stoic

Moral tale concerning

A dull provincial doctor’s

young French wife. If Mother,

in French, begins to sing

To herself, I know she’s

had enough. Crayon stubs

litter the crumbling rug.

Our prostrate cat sneezes

at the dust in her fur.

And cries from a swallow

remind us one swallow

doesn’t make a summer.

First person voice

Ten stanzas, four lines each, hexameter

Slant rhyme in lines one and four of each verse

except for third, fifth, and seventh. Also in lines

two and three in stanzas one, three, six, seven, eight,

and nine.

Title alludes to literature but poem alludes

to marital tension.

Alliteration in “color with crayons,” “livingroom rug,” “cracks

in the kitchen’s,” “read from the red gilt volume in his lap,”

“swallow…summer.”

Assonance in “mother” and “color”; “Though…no…/no”;

“volume” and “womb”; “know” and “Pharoahs”; “Crusaders”

and “grapes”; “stubs” / …”crumbling rug”; “prostrate cat”.

Enjambment except for lines one, six, twelve, fifteen, sixteen,

Seventeen, twenty-two, thirty-three, and thirty-six.

Similes and imagery: “as bugs waving their antennae,” and “like hearts in a womb.”

Innuendo in double-duty word “gilt”

Cliché idiom: “…one swallow doesn’t make a summer.”