One Explication of the Sistrunk

The Welty quote from Ponder Heart isn’t quite right for this and not what I had in mind BUT I didn’t want to lose it.  It’s not the quote that is meant to be useful here, but the story around it and so the reader would have to have knowledge of the book.

It’s meant to make reading something like when a dermatologist or surgeon removes a mole that is “suspicious”—they take “2 inch” margins, enough tissue to feel like they’ve “cleared" the disease.  You, as reader need to read more than the quote, you need to take 2 inch margins too.

So, the poem is about the removing of a mole without clearing the margins.

Pyrite is fool’s gold.  This is meant as a reversal—the mole is “valuable” as it carries the cancer, and carries the knowledge of the cancer if viewed under a microscope, but the gp throws it in the trash as if it were “valueless" and "harmless" (as it in fact normally is).

The freezing won’t stop the cancer and actually hides the “truth” that is happening below the surface (evasion/invasion).

So the scarring hides the secret that was “unmargined,” not cleared and not tested.  The rest is the action of the cancer—one cell that is in perpetual motion (dynamic)—violating the body and violating entropy—keeps growing and would keep on if not for death.

The “ulterior” you means that cancer is OF your own cell structure and it has its own designs on you but it is still part of you, not foreign—an internal invasion.  It is a blind, unknowing expansion—it is unknown because it is not really you.

“a meta state of being” is both metastatic and the way you see yourself as no longer yourself but as a disease….the petty pace of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow is Shakespeare, and intends the creeping of death-in-life.  And And And is the dying once the conjunction is rendered meaningless.