Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Michael McClure’s "Grafting: 9" is an intimate, transformative meditation on memory, perception, and the fluid nature of selfhood. The poem oscillates between tenderness and inevitability, between the immediacy of touch and the slow solidification of time. McClure’s characteristic fusion of the organic and the cerebral—his tendency to treat consciousness as something both malleable and sculptural—gives this poem its haunting, delicate force.

The poem begins with a declaration of identity and relationship—"YOU ARE MY MEMORIES OF YOU holding my hand." The use of the second person addresses an unnamed presence, a beloved or an abstraction, who is both a figure of the past and the act of remembering itself. The phrase collapses the distinction between presence and recollection; the you is not simply someone remembered, but the very act of memory itself. By holding the poet’s hand, this memory becomes tangible, an entity both external and internal, past and present at once.

The next line—"I WANT TO GO ANYWHERE."—is a contrast to the fixity implied by memory. It expresses an urge for movement, escape, or transcendence, as if the act of remembering both roots and confines the speaker. This line is brief, direct, and urgent, an existential restlessness that McClure often embraces in his work. The open-ended anywhere suggests both freedom and uncertainty, a desire that is undefined yet powerful.

The declaration—"I am a flowering."—introduces a shift toward organic transformation. Flowering is an image of becoming, of opening, of natural and inevitable expansion. The poet is not merely reflecting on the past but unfolding into something new, as if memory itself is not static but generative. This idea is reinforced by the next assertion—"YOU MAKE ME A THOUGHT-DIVER, elastic and miraculous in every deed and sniff and laugh I’ve ever done." Here, the you—whether a specific person, a muse, or even consciousness itself—gives the poet a kind of fluidity, a capacity to plunge into thought and experience without resistance. Elastic and miraculous suggests a stretching of boundaries, a movement through perception that is both effortless and wondrous. Even the most fleeting, sensory moments—sniff and laugh—are imbued with significance, embedded within this expansive act of thought-diving.

Then comes a subtle turn toward something harder, less mutable—"EACH SOFT TOUCH and toothed cruelty is embedded in the dream structure OF THIS STUFF that turns into something too much like stone." The pairing of soft touch and toothed cruelty acknowledges the duality of experience—gentleness and pain, pleasure and harm—both of which leave an imprint on the dream structure of consciousness. The phrase dream structure suggests that memory and perception are constructed, layered, and malleable. However, the final transformation—"that turns into something too much like stone."—implies a hardening, a shift from fluidity to permanence. The stuff that once allowed for movement and reinvention gradually ossifies, becoming rigid with time. This could suggest the way memory, once alive and shifting, solidifies into something unchangeable, or how the self, over time, loses its elastic and miraculous nature.

The location—"above Santa Fe, New Mexico."—places the poem in a specific geographic and emotional space. Santa Fe, with its expansive skies and ancient, weathered landscapes, reinforces the poem’s tension between movement and stillness, between fleeting experience and permanence. It is a place of vast openness and deep history, mirroring the poet’s reflection on time, memory, and transformation.

"Grafting: 9" captures McClure’s ability to render consciousness as a dynamic, organic force—one that is shaped by experience but also bound by it. The poem moves from tenderness to restlessness, from expansion to inevitability, as it explores the ways in which love, memory, and selfhood are simultaneously fluid and fixed. The final image of turning into something too much like stone lingers as a quiet warning—perhaps against stagnation, against losing the elasticity of thought, or against the way time has a tendency to crystallize what was once in motion. In its brevity, the poem is both a celebration of presence and a lament for the slow, creeping permanence that inevitably follows.

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