"Anger what good" is how Neil Myers begins "For Rachel," with no comma, no question mark and no capital letter. We can't tell whether the speaker is asking a real question, waving the feeling away, or muttering to himself while he works. That uncertainty sets the tone for what follows: a man raking a garden after a late frost, angry about something the poem never names, and finding that the world around him has taken over the job of being angry for him.
The key move comes in the second line: "the flower is angrier than i am." It is a strange claim, and the poem doesn't defend it. The last lines suggest the flowers are crocuses brought down by "the sudden freeze," so the flower's anger would be that of something that came up too early and was struck. The speaker hands his own rage to the flower, then to "the blood / that rights & jerks in the ground / when i slice it with my rake." The poem never says whose blood this is. Judging by the imagery, it belongs to some small living creature cut by the tool in his hand, and a worm is the obvious guess, though that is only an inference. The verb "rights" is unusual. I read it as the creature trying to right itself after the blow, though it also carries a faint echo of "rights" as in what is owed, a pun the poem leaves alone. Beside "jerks," it gives a quick, involuntary twitch, and the ampersand makes the line itself twitch. The speaker is not just watching. He holds the rake, so the thing that is "angrier than i am" is something he has just hurt. That is uncomfortable and honest, because his anger has a physical effect in the world.
Then the poem turns on a participle: "my daughter following / pulling crocus flowers / off the flagstone." After the sharp verbs of the middle lines, *slice* and *jerks*, the child's action is small and unhurried. She trails behind him like a second figure in the same frame, and her gesture is a quiet echo of his. He cuts things apart, and she pulls flowers from the stone. But she has none of his fury. "Following" works twice, since she walks behind him and also follows his lead, as children do. The poem asks us to hold two moods in one garden: the adult's rage and the child's absorbed, almost tender attention to what is left.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme, no regular metre and no punctuation at all, so the ten lines run on as one unbroken thought, and the lowercase "i" makes the speaker seem smaller, as if he were reluctant to take up space. Line lengths vary, with the longest, the claim about the flower, placed early, and the lines thinning toward the end. The sounds help. The hard consonants of "crocus," "rake" and "flagstone" feel physical, while the hissing of "slice" and "sudden freeze" suggests cold air and a blade passing through. The repetition of "angry" in "angrier" is the only rhetorical flourish, and it is flat and almost childlike, as if the speaker could not find a more elaborate word.
The ending is the most carefully handled part. "Where the sudden freeze / left them" stops without a full stop, and "left" does double duty: the frost deposited the flowers there, and it abandoned them. The poem is left in the same state, without consolation, resolution or lesson. We never learn what the anger is about, whether it passes, or what the girl makes of it.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. It shows how anger moves outward, from a person to a plant to a wounded creature to a child, without ever explaining itself. The title is also worth a thought. "For Rachel" reads like a dedication, and if Rachel is the daughter in the poem, which the text only suggests, then the poem becomes something offered to the child who witnessed the scene, part confession, part gift. Either way, it manages in a handful of unpunctuated lines to say that anger is useless, that it still happens, and that someone small is usually watching.