Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

David Lehman’s "Operation Memory" is a formally intricate and thematically layered meditation on memory, war, and personal displacement. Structured as a sestina, the poem employs a fixed pattern of end words that recur in a shifting order across six stanzas and a final three-line envoi. This strict form contrasts with the poem’s fluid and fragmented narrative, reinforcing the idea that memory is both structured and chaotic, an ordered repetition masking the instability of lived experience.

The poem opens with an atmosphere of haze and disorientation: "We were smoking some of this knockout weed when / Operation Memory was announced." The phrase "Operation Memory" suggests both a military campaign and a psychological exercise, immediately blending war imagery with the personal act of recollection. The second line introduces the motif of counting backward, often associated with hypnotic suggestion or anesthesia, reinforcing a sense of erasure and dissociation. The speaker, caught between "a recession, a strange city, jobs, / apartments, and wives," exists in a liminal space, as if suspended between multiple realities.

The sestina’s repetition amplifies this sense of entrapment, with the words "bed," "middle," "loaded," "jobs," "when," and "one" shaping the poem’s shifting focus. The word "loaded" carries multiple meanings, referring both to intoxication and to the presence of a gun, hinting at violence, real or metaphorical, beneath the poem’s surface. The phrase "Nobody told me the gun was loaded." in the first stanza reads as both literal and existential—a realization of being placed in danger without forewarning.

The second stanza deepens the poem’s sense of dislocation: "All my friends had jobs / As professional liars, and most had partners who were good in bed." The irony here suggests a world in which deception is professionalized and intimacy is transactional. The speaker, lacking both stability and direction, describes himself as "always being in the middle of things," reinforcing the recurring theme of in-betweenness—whether between youth and age, war and peace, presence and absence.

The poem’s narrative seems to oscillate between different timelines. In the third stanza, the speaker recalls his draft interview, responding to a question about his motivations with flippant bravado: "In bed / With a broad." This crass remark contrasts with the undercurrent of desperation in the line that follows: "The truth was, jobs / Were scarce." The mention of "1970" places the poem within the context of the Vietnam War, but rather than engaging directly with combat, the poem highlights the bureaucratic absurdities surrounding military service, as seen in the judge’s command to "practice my disappearing act."

The fourth stanza, with its reference to "a journey down nameless, snow-covered streets," evokes the noirish atmosphere of disillusionment. The speaker describes an "annual reunion" of orphans who "unloaded / A kit bag full of troubles, and smiled bravely." The phrase suggests that survival—whether in war, work, or memory—requires performance, a brave front masking inner turmoil.

The fifth stanza intensifies the poem’s wartime imagery: "Thanks to Operation Memory, each of us woke up in a different bed / Or coffin, with a different partner beside him, in the middle / Of a war that had never been declared." The phrase "war that had never been declared" suggests both literal undeclared conflicts and the more abstract personal battles—against memory, aging, and regret. The repetition of "bed" throughout the poem underscores both rest and intimacy, yet here it becomes synonymous with death, a reminder of the inescapable consequences of time and history.

The final tercet delivers a stark conclusion: "It happened, I was asleep in bed, and when I woke up, / It was over: I was 38, on the brink of middle age, / A succession of stupid jobs behind me, a loaded gun on my lap." The speaker’s progression from draft-age youth to middle-aged disillusionment has been compressed into the poem’s tightly controlled structure. The phrase "a loaded gun on my lap"—a return to the earlier motif of unexpected danger—suggests both the lingering threat of violence and a moment of reckoning.

By using the sestina’s repetitive structure, Lehman reinforces the cyclical nature of memory, regret, and fate. The poem’s disjointed timeline and shifting registers—from war to personal history to bureaucratic absurdity—mirror the fragmented way the mind reconstructs the past. "Operation Memory" ultimately portrays memory as both a battleground and a form of survival, where the repetition of words and images becomes a means of navigating the past’s unresolved tensions.

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