“Bright Copper Kettles”
In “Bright Copper Kettles”, Vijay Sheshadri hints at the non-concrete disposition of ghosts: “I like it so much I sleep all the time./Moon by day and sun by night find me dispersed/deep in the dreams where they appear.” The ghosts recurrently manifest in Seshadri’s dreams; hence, they are not corporeal like distinguishable humans. The ghosts are designed by Sheshadri’s remembrances of the deceased family and associates.
Vijay Sheshadri demystifies the conception about the propensity of the ghosts to exasperatingly inconvenience the living: “They are diffident and polite./Who knew the dead were so polite?)/They don’t want to scare me; their heads don’t spin like weather vanes./They don’t want to steal my body/and possess the earth and wreak vengeance.” The ghosts that Sheshadri distinguishes are more amiable because there are not absorbed on wreaking devastation in Sheshadri’s lifetime. This indicates that the ghosts are based on congenial reminiscences that would not alarm Sheshadri when she is picturing them in her reveries.
Vijay Sheshadri responds the inquiry, “Are ghosts material? : “They’re dead, you understand, they don’t exist. And, besides,/why would they care? They’re subatomic, horizontal. Think about it./One of them shyly offers me a pencil.” Sheshadri’s rejoinder on the animation of ghost conjectures that the ghosts are ascribed to the unconscious remembrances that activate dreams about the deceased. The figurative subatoms means that the ghost are insubstantial. The horizontality of ghosts surmises that they are imaginary for humans do not portray a horizontal deportment.
“Three Persons”
The principal character in “Three Persons” is a prosperous woman who derelicted her partner for she deemed him as sluggish. The speaker explicates, “That slow person you left behind when, finally,/you mastered the world, and scaled the heights you now command,/where is he while you/walk around the shaved lawn in your plus fours,/organizing with an electric clipboard/your big push to tomorrow?” Manifestly, the woman( the addressee) is blooming materially due to her unconstrained obtainability of ‘shave lawns’, ‘plus fours’ ( which epitomize cars) and ‘electric clipboards.’ The woman has moved on from her partner who is not as affluent as her.
The addressee’s Mythic persona is based on the embellished stories that publicize her ascent to the uppermost point of the mobility pecking order: “Others see in you sundry mythic types distinguished/not just in themselves but by the stories/we put them in, with beginnings, ends, surprises.” Outsiders venerate the woman for she portrays the efficacious veracity of Rugged Individualism.
The allusion of the Oedipal Complex and the grandmother’s phenomenal deliverance are allegories to the startling particulars that are integrated in mythical biographies to glamorize flourishing individuals: “the baby Oedipus on the hillside with his broken feet/or the dog whose barking saves the grandmother/flailing in the millpond beyond the weir,/dragged down by her woolen skirt.” These tales deduce that the popular persona that the addressee portrays is falsified, and its object is to portray her in affirmative light so that she can appeal to the consumers of inflated mythologies.
Patently, the woman’s partner is still confounded by the desertion for “He doesn’t see you as a story, though./He feels you as his atmosphere. When your sun shines,/he chortles. When your barometric pressure drops/and the thunderheads gather,/he huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with/the stubby little pencils he steals from the public library./He asks me to look out for you.” The ‘he’ does not believe in the overstated accounts regarding the addressee. The imageries of the ‘atmosphere, the sun and thunderheads’ sustain that the ‘he’ esteems the addressee for who she is and not for the materialistic achievements that she has reaped or the specifics that are merged in her romanticized narratives.
