Dislocation

A poem of physical and psychological displacement in which an elbow injury, whiskey, trains, and the language of tramps converge into a portrait of a life knocked permanently out of joint.

A nine-line account of an arm injury that doubles as a portrait of a life off the rails: 'They took the bone to a blade / Cut me at the elbow like an ele' and the speaker 'hushed them through my whiskey' half way down. The damaged limb stays: 'Now it hangs as I hock my life / With the halfway hook / I trap in my mind as a tramp' The closing lines place the scene in railyard hobo memory - 'That day on the off of trains / As I never hunt for bloodshed in the yard' - so the dislocation is at once medical, vagrant, and self-haunting.

The poem makes its title operate on three levels at once: a dislocated joint, a dislocated life among trains and tramps, and a dislocated syntax that breaks off ('like an ele') as if the line itself were severed. Whiskey is the only anesthetic, and the 'halfway hook' that the speaker now lives by - a maimed elbow that cannot fully close - becomes the instrument with which he 'hock[s]' his life - pawning what the injury has left. The disavowal 'I never hunt for bloodshed in the yard' protests an innocence the bloodied scene keeps undercutting. The double-struck typing leaves ghost marks after many words; the broken-off 'ele' is kept as written, and the reading stays partly provisional given the fragment's compression.