Word Games

When living, the air     lifted me up,
the wind from the wave,    and bore me afar,
up over the seal’s bath.     Tell me my name.

English poetry is riddled with riddles. The Exeter Book, a tenth-century anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry, brims with mysteries like the one above (answer: the barnacle goose). In a pivotal scene from The Merchant of Venice, Portia’s suitors must choose among three caskets, each of which features a coded inscription: “Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath,” reads one. We must give all we have to understand riddles, too—and that includes the several examples in the December 2015 Poetry.

Ian Duhig’s “Riddle” begins:

Who I am’s child’s play,
a cry in a kindergarten;
though I pun on Latin,
my Yorkshire kin’s laik,

a whole lexical rainbow
unweaving in no code,
no Mason’s Mahabone
nor Horseman’s Word —

but I’m caltrops at night
to the bare feet of adults
inspiring their language
to such colors as I am….

“Who I am’s child’s play”: this poem, like the Anglo-Saxon example above, speaks for itself, and its opening line serves several functions. It suggests that the riddle describes a childhood game and that figuring out its answer should be simple, mere child’s play. More subtly, it equates the poem (“I”) to a game—a metaphor this poem will bear out.

Like a scavenger hunt, “Riddle” sends us searching for clues. What is “laik,” which Duhig describes as “Yorkshire kin”? A verb that means “to play” (and that recalls the English “like”—that signifier of similarity, of kinship). What are caltrops? Spiked metal devices placed on the ground to impede travel—and a nice metaphor for the prickly terms that slow our progress through the poem. How about Mason’s Mahabone and the Horseman’s Word? Both turn out to be expressions used by secret societies. In the latter examples, Duhig uses code to assure us that the subject of his poem—whatever it is—employs none.

Eventually, all of his clues snap together like—well, like Legos (aha!). Suddenly new meanings announce themselves, from the kindergarten cry “Leggo!” to the sly sonic echo of “lexical.” Questions arise, too: to what degree is every poem a riddle, a mysterious utterance that by turn conceals and reveals? And to what degree is every poem a game of Legos—a playful, colorful construction whose parts fit neatly together?

Zaffar Kunial’s “Empty Words” toys with code, too:

Meaning “homeland” — mulk
(in Kashmir) — exactly how
my son demands milk.

The child’s approximation of “milk” strikes the speaker as something else: a reference to a Kashmiri term, and to the speaker’s native code. For the reader, the “milk” / “mulk” pair suggests still more meanings. The words don’t quite rhyme—a verbal representation of the exile’s difficulty fitting in—and their association suggests that a homeland is, like milk, both nourishing and fundamental.

In addition to describing a confused child, Kunial strategically confuses us, too. A word’s meaning appears before the word itself; grammar twists unpredictably; dashes and parentheses, like Duhig’s caltrops, trip us up. Our disorientation echoes the experience of a child who is just finding his way around language, or of an exile far from home: he, too, must learn to read the unfamiliar.

Fittingly, reading provides the theme of another stanza:

Letters. West to east
Mum’s hand would write; Dad’s script goes
east to west. Received.

“Letters” means both notes and characters, and the directions refer both to geography and to orientation of script. As in the previous stanza—and several others in this poem—the rhyme of first and third lines is inexact (“east” / “received”), and the second line, which holds the two near-rhymes apart, reflects the physical distance that separates the speaker from his homeland, as well as his parents from one another. This stanza prompts us to recognize that we’re reading these lines from west to east, in English—a code in its own right. The very language of the poem, the direction our eyes take as they sweep the page, attests to the exile of its speaker.

If Kunial strives to recover a lost identity, Atsuro Riley uses coding to submerge it:

I been ‘Candy’ since I came here young.


My born name keeps but I don’t say.


To her who my mama was I was

pure millstone, cumbrance.   Child ain’t but a towsack full of bane.

This speaker goes by Candy but refuses to share his true name, though his mother provided various possibilities: millstone, cumbrance, “towsack full of bane.” In turn, he refers to her cagily: not “my mama” but “her who my mama was.” The syntax serves as yet another caltrop, one that suggests the emotional blockades between mother and child.

As the poem proceeds, other psychological complexities arise. A man “swore I was surely something”:

Some thing —
(snared) (spat-on) Thing
being morelike moresoever what he meant.


No I’d never sound what brunts he called me what he done
had I a hundred mouths.

From Candy to cumbrance to, now, Thing—this man gives the speaker a new name, and calls him “brunts” besides. In response to this talk, the speaker is silent: he refuses to repeat those “brunts” and to tell us what happened, just as he refuses to reveal his own name. He’ll “never sound”—which suggests he’ll never articulate this trauma, and also that he’ll never probe it, never seek to understand it. His experience will remain a riddle, both for us and for him.