Open a face and find a trapped animal: that is the poem's first jolting move. Where we might expect a look of pleasure, the speaker sees "no orgasm / but a rabbit, / paw caught" in a steel trap. The face belongs to a man who was "my teacher," and the poem is an attempt to understand why his sternness felt so familiar. The answer is that it recalls the speaker's father, and behind the father, a mother "caught / among the wrathful contraries." The central idea is that the speaker's origins as a writer lie in recognising pain behind authority. What first looks like severity turns out to be a wound, and that wound, strangely, is what gives the teacher his power.
The imagery is built on one extended, slightly dreamlike metaphor: the face is a tree. Its top is "generous / spread to heaven," while at its base the trap clamps down. Roots "sneak out for water" at night, past the trap, as if the man's real needs go on secretly beneath a disciplined surface. Then the picture shifts. The tree becomes a medium in which the mother "swam," so the same image holds both the father-like teacher and the trapped mother. The poem also reaches for other faces. It sets "Reich in Freud's" (we have to supply "face") seeing despair, "the no / constantly clamped," so the trap becomes a habit of refusal. It then mentions the woman in Picasso's *Guernica*, who holds out a lamp, and turns it into a "stone / torch of head." Suffering, art and teaching all crowd together.
The poem turns when the speaker is writing and feels that head "over my shoulder in utter / despair... wanting to nestle." The stern figure now wants comfort, and the power relation reverses. The speaker accepts the trapped rabbit as "a railroad crossing / I had to make," a place of danger that must be passed through. Even the man's "lacunae" (gaps, like missing words in a damaged text) become "precious." Two images then explain why. The missing in all men "fills to sea," and in this man there is "order / around a rock, / pebbles raked / around a rock," an image that suggests a carefully tended garden. Even his "granite too / moves." His stillness hides motion, and his absences are what "set / others in motion."
The form matches this theme. There is no regular meter or end-rhyme, only short, broken lines in free verse. Still, "base" and "face" chime, and the pair returns ("steel at the base / of the tree, / which was his face"; "the rabbit chained at the / base of his face"), so the trap and the face are bound together by sound. Line breaks fall on tense words, such as "paw caught" followed by a gap before "steel." The syntax is full of lacunae of its own. The poem opens on a dangling "That," and it leaves out words: "allowed me grasp," "most a railroad crossing," "fills to sea." Readers have to cross these gaps as the speaker crosses the trap, so the missing becomes something we experience as well as read about. The ampersand in "& never knew why" gives the voice a hurried, notebook-like quality.
The ending slows right down. "Tested me / tested me" repeats like a hammer blow, then "allowed me grasp // forever hence / what I saw" closes the poem on a short, hard-won line. The title now makes sense: the "origin" is the moment of seeing, when a teacher's hidden suffering teaches the speaker how to look.
The poem is significant because it avoids the neat, grateful tribute to a mentor. It gives us an unsettled portrait in which authority, family pain and vision are tangled together. It also suggests that what a person lacks can teach as much as what they know. Without giving the teacher's name, the poem still makes him vivid, as a face that is a tree and a trap and a stone that moves.