This poem serves as a prime example of a poet who has reckoned that the lack of understanding most readers of poetry possess will vouchsafe an entire career in poetry.
Carolyn Forché’s “Poem for Maya” consists of 21 free verse lines. The poem segments into five sentences, uneven, with the first sentence running the first five lines. The second contains the next four lines, as does the third. Then the fourth is only one line. The fifth fills out the final seven lines.
“Dipping out bread in oil tins”
The speaker of “Poem for Maya” lets the reader know right away that she will be playing a game of hide and seek in the following 21 lines. The reader begins to guess, first of all: who is Maya? Then in the first line, it appears that Maya is a friend or an acquaintance of the speaker, and the two friends spent some time in Mallorca, “Dipping their bread in oil tins.”
While they talked about morning “peeling / open our rooms to a moment of almonds, olives, and wind.” And as they did this or rather as morning did this to their rooms, they did “not yet know what [they] were.”
“The days in Mallorca were alike”
Apparently, the time the two spent in Mallorca was rather boring and uneventful. During the day, they took walks “down goat-paths” after leaving their beds, as opposed to taking a walk while remaining in bed as poets are often wont to do, and at night they observed that “the stars” were “locked to darkness.”
Of course, these silly stars are same everywhere, surrounded in the darkness of the night. But we must remember that these two friends or acquaintances did not yet know what they were, so they might have expected the stars to be otherwise in a place like Mallorca.
“At that time we were learning”
The speaker then reveals that the two friends were learning to dance, which included “tak[ing] our clothes / in our fingers and open / ourselves to their hand.” To their partners, it must be speculated. Yet the speaker does not elaborate why she mentions this insignificant detail. But the reader is acutely aware that the detail was important to the speaker and her friend.
“The veranera was with us”
This line is baffling, and the reader must wonder if the word “veranera” is a typo. “Veranera” refers to a plant similar to the bougainvillea. Speculation leads to possibilities such as “verano” meaning “summer”; it would make more sense to say that summer was with us than that the flower was with us. But perhaps the naïveté of the speaker is better preserved with the term “veranera.”
“For a month the almond trees bloomed”
The kernel of meaning nestled in the last seven lines is the simple declarative, “the almond trees bloomed.” The rest is pure description that reveals a poet trying to be poetic, but simply mangling the effort. The trees bloomed for a month. Why is this important? Were you there only for a month? They dropped filaments that they speaker and her friend “removed” every time a “touch” brought them “closer to the window.” Whose touch? How does that happen, that a disembodied touch brings you closer to a window?
At the window, they whisper “yes” on the “intricate / balconies of breath,” and they were “overlooking / the rest of [their] lives.” Just what can be inferred from “intricate / balconies of breath”? Is that the bosoms? Is it simply referring to their breathing while standing on a balcony and looking out from their rooms?
Regardless, it does, indeed, sound so profound when the speaker asserts that they were “overlooking / the rest of [their] lives.”
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