In Blazek's November, weather and mind are hard to tell apart. The rain that "clots in / the fertilized gutter of my / dust packed soul" is part blood, part sewage and part garden soil, and the poem never lets those meanings drift far from each other. It moves from the speaker's private pain, through a rain-soaked street, to a bitter view of a world that excuses its violence, and then back to the rain with a small, odd relief. Its central idea is that inner suffering and public brutality are not separate subjects. The same imagery of burning, rot and waste runs through both, and the only comfort on offer is to let it drain away.
The form suits that overflow. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines vary a great deal in length. Sentences break at awkward places ("clots in", "of my"), so the syntax spills over the line ends the way water spills over a gutter. The long, clause-stacked sentences sound like a mind that cannot stop talking to itself, and now and then a short line, such as "through which I walk," brings it up short. Repetition gives the poem its only fixed points: "November rain" opens the first and third stanzas, and the final stanza returns to it with a weary "Ah, but."
The imagery is crowded and deliberately mismatched. The mind becomes a stock exchange, with "ticker tape thoughts struck by lightning" and "mad stockholders of cells" panicking inside the body, while everyday life is just a "plastic backdrop." When the speaker tries to console himself with "Great Auk stars," he reaches for something grand and distant, yet the Great Auk is an extinct bird, so even the comfort is already gone. The remedy he imagines is "petroleum jelly," a cheap industrial salve that cannot soothe "inward x-raying eyes." Then he undercuts his own suffering: "frog legs of pain / can-can in burlesque of my seriousness." The self-mockery keeps the poem from wallowing. It admits that agony can look absurd from the inside. When his stomach "unreels in newsreel battle gore," private pain turns into war footage. The face that hides it all belongs to "one Douglas Blazek," a name that sounds like a label on a file.
The third stanza steps outside, and the world is no kinder. Brief sun "freckles" the rain, and "onion-faced old women" scurry for cabbages, with faces and vegetables blurring together. Then the rain returns "like crumbling chimneys," the street goes "hollow," and cars "sizzle" down the "black mica" before they "erase themselves with the night." That verb echoes the earlier burns, so even traffic seems scorched.
The fourth stanza turns this mood into open satire. Earth "must be a strange place for a mapmaker," because "battlefields turn into fertilizer" and "children into burnt pudding." The kitchen word is what makes the line horrifying. The sneer in "necessary evil" and "necessary good" exposes how easily tanks and bombs are justified. The closing observation that "kiss" and "kill" differ by only two letters is almost too neat, but its glibness fits a speaker who has stopped expecting the world to make moral sense.
The last stanza reverses the weather without cancelling the pain. Relief arrives mostly as negatives: his ribs "are not barbecuing in radioactive delight," and "fossilized pain is melting." Some details stay puzzling, such as the kids "wading in boxes of blacks," and the poem seems content to leave them so. The hard black street from before becomes a "soft lizard" with traffic lights "pinballing" along its spine, so the city turns playful for a moment. Finally the speaker's soul "floats in / rippling fingers towards the drainage ditch," making "the only map I understand." This answers the mapmaker of stanza four, and it recalls how "rivers turn into drainage ditches." The title now reads two ways, as a sewer and as a wound being drained. The dust-packed soul is loosened by water, and the speaker's only reliable geography is the route of runoff.
The poem is worth reading for how it mixes registers, with cabaret next to carnage, jelly next to radiation, and pinball next to despair. Its images of newsreels, bombs and radioactivity suggest a mind shaped by seeing war and nuclear threat at a distance, though that is an inference from the text. The result is a poem that is wry and angry about the world and its speaker's own seriousness, and it is honest about how modest real relief can be.