The coin given to the dead seems an obvious allusion to the payment proffered to the mythological ferryman of the dead--which I think is where the custom of placing coins over the eyes came from as well, no? In its transmutation of the coin to a subway token, the resulting marriage of the mythological to the mundane here is quite effective for me: in a quietly profound sense the right of our own making becomes the rite of making the myth our own. And that is a sacred rite indeed!
Sure, the pronouns are a little entangled on one's first read, but unknitting them is part of the poem's emotional evolution as the point of view keeps shifting: from you, to he, to I, and ultimately to us. That final shift to us is a shift of unbearable poignancy as what was shared only in an unspoken fashion between a distant father and son becomes a more conscious ritual of intimacy between husband and wife, one that both heals the former distance through return and bodes well for what is close-at-hand in the present and opened-up for the future. This gives the poem an arc of psychological development and an emotional resolution that seems glowingly healthy, a true making of peace with the dead and a true sharing with the living. As such the poem itself is bearing the bright coin, and the reader himself is wealthy-waking on having emerged from meditation upon it.
Hands down (and open) my favorite so far.
Nemo
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Hybrid Mode
