CONSCIOUS, Translation Party Version — Summary

Mary F. C. PrattContemplative

I find the clean air –this is the starting point.. Here are the types of sound floating insects make. I have one in my mouth. Take it.

Or a chipmunk, rustic warmth of a hole filled with nuts and seeds, the smell of wet leaves and the world. Or a wasp chewing the old railing, carrying the pulp home and spitting it out, building the layers of my smothering and exquisite nest.

Or a wolf, in a whisper, I have heard every turn of the deer. I return to myself and wake up in the scent. Or a porcupine, shuffling in the forest without scruple. Partridge–I am a great whirring, wings open. A salamander trying to comprehend the road.

I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat, a weasel itself, a whale, the mind of a swarm of bees. Oh, my little heart has limits!

Can you remember what was it like to be a newborn– a differentiation in the world of its own sort of brain? Do you even know what is it like to be yourself, unconscious of nearly everything?

Show the whole poemHide the poem

Learn Poems app

Try the Learn Poems app

Everything from the website trainer, and more: new exercises, voice recording and sharing, reminders, quick review.

The speaker wants to step outside the human mind and feel what it is like to be other creatures. One by one, she imagines a chipmunk in its warm burrow, a wasp building a nest, a wolf listening to a deer, a partridge bursting into flight, a salamander facing a road. Each image is sensory and close-up, full of smells, sounds and textures rather than abstract thought. The title suggests the text may have been passed through machine translation, which could explain some of the odd phrasing, though that is an inference from the title alone.

Then the mood shifts. The speaker admits, "my little heart has limits," and turns the question back on us. Can we remember being a newborn? Do we really know what it is like to be ourselves, when we are "unconscious of nearly everything"? The poem begins with eager curiosity and playful imagination, then ends with humility, even a little unease, about how little we understand our own minds.

Read also

More by Mary F. C. Pratt

All poems
SadMary F. C. Pratt

AFTER THE FLOOD

What have the sunflowers lost? Look at them all, heads bent down heavy, anxiously, earnestly searching the ground. Or maybe they hear Persephone
CheerfulMary F. C. Pratt

REVOLUTION

Every spring she lifted the carpet in the lounge where the old boys sat drinking their single-malts.
DreamyMary F. C. Pratt

THE PLACE

There is deep water running underneath, and far beneath the blue clay the stone body of a great fish, and deeper still the shards