Poetry is one of those elusive things that is hard to define. There is a beautiful description of poetry in Sanskrit literature. Imagine that you are looking at a cloudy sky and the moon is barely visible. You want to show the moon to someone. So you show that person a branch of a tree and tell him to look at the end of it. That’s where the moon is. The branch is like words in a poem. The poet wants to show you the moon but he is describing the branch. The words in a poem are only secondary, it is the moon where the soul of the poem resides.
Of course, not all poems will be like this. There are more literal poems that are as effective but it’s a useful analogy to keep in mind. You have to do some homework to understand good poetry. When a poet says ‘wet moon’, the moon itself is not wet. That would be absurd. Maybe it rained heavily that day and the rain stopped just as the moon rose. Water was still falling from branches and wet leaves reflected the moonlight. Or maybe it was a moon seen by eyes that were wet with tears. Just two words in a poem but it may take pages to describe the meaning behind them. The words in a poem are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle except that here, there are many solutions and all of them are right.
On Every Street is a song by the British rock group Dire Straits. The chorus line of the song is “And it’s your face I am looking for, on every street.” If you just look at this line, you may think it’s a romantic song. There is nothing romantic about the song. On Every Street is about a cop and the killer he is trying to catch. At least that’s my interpretation. There are other interpretations that are equally plausible.
There’s gotta be a record of you someplace
You gotta be on somebody’s books
The lowdown, a picture of your face
Your injured looks
The sacred and profane
The pleasure and the pain
Somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete
And it’s your face I’m looking for on every street
A ladykiller, regulation tattoo
Silver spurs on his heels
Says, what can I tell you, as I’m standing next to you
She threw herself under my wheels
Oh it’s a dangerous road
And a hazardous load
And the fireworks over liberty explode in the heat
And it’s your face I’m looking for on every street
A three-chord symphony crashes into space
The moon is hanging upside down
I don’t know why it is I’m still on the case
It’s a ravenous town
And you still refuse to be traced
Seems to me such a waste
And every victory has a taste that’s bittersweet
And it’s your face I’m looking for on every street
The first stanza is clearly the description of the killer. You must have done other crimes, the cop says. You should be in someone’s records. Why are you not? The killer has a mean face (lowdown) and his looks are injured. The second bit is interesting. Does he have an injury mark of the face? Or is he talking about emotional injury? Emotional injury takes us straight into Dostoyevskian landscape. The killer became who he was because of the abuse he suffered in his childhood. You must have left some clue, some evidence (fingerprints). Where is it?
Second stanza is the most gruesome. The killer is a ladies man, probably ex-Army because he has a regulation tattoo. He wears cowboy boots, with silver spurs on them. I had to look this up. These are wheels on the back of cowboy boots that you see in Western movies. The killer is caught and he says, it was not my fault. I did not run her over, she threw herself under my wheels. Apparently, he gets away with this explanation because he is now roaming free. Maybe this happened in New York during festivities, the Statue of Liberty looking over the incident, which in turn invokes the image of Lady Justice, blindfolded and comparing the evidence.
Third stanza describes the frustration of the cop to bring the killer to justice. There are many clues here. Three chord symphony – Beethoven’s Fifth? What does ‘moon is hanging upside down’ mean? Lines like these really test your imagination. My take is this. The cop has turned alcoholic, always drunk. He is lying on a street, looking toward the sky and he sees the moon ‘hanging upside down.’ The trail has gone cold, it has been so long that he wonders why he is still working on the case. And yet the killer refuses to be traced. Despite of all this, the cop cannot help looking for the killer – on every street.
If you post this song on poemhunter.com, it would not be out of place. The lyrics are so strong that they stand up on their own. In addition, Mark Knopfler composed this song in a beautiful way. There are no beats accompanying the lyrics, just piano, guitars and saxophone. This unusual rendering creates a haunting atmosphere, followed by a medley that is characteristic of most Dire Straits songs. A reason for this lies in the strong Jazz and Blues roots of the group. Mark explains it thus, “If you get to the end of a vocal and you’ve got nothing more to say but maybe the guitar has.”
I mentioned one interpretation of poetry in the beginning. Here’s another. Mark Knopfler is painting a sketch with bare minimum strokes and colours. You have to fill in the rest. So now I do the same thing I always do while reading books – direct a movie, in my head.
For the cop, I want young Al Pacino. Remember the scene in The Godfather where Michael comes back from the restroom with the gun and sits down? Sollozzo is talking in Italian (a Sicilian dialect, to be precise) but Michael is not paying attention, indicated by the overlapping sound of the train. For the killer, I would cast Sean Penn. Cowboy hats and boots with silver spurs, a southern accent, an army posture and a mean vibe. He has zero remorse for the woman he has killed.
Al Pacino comes out a bar in New York, unshaven, red eyes, drunk but not enough to lose control. Suddenly in the crowd he sees a familiar western hat. His pulse racing, he starts to walk fast towards it, pushing people out of the way and confronts the person only to find it’s a false alarm. All the frustration over the years can be seen clearly in his eyes. Dejected, he walks back towards the bar. A song is playing in the background,
And it’s your face I’m looking for on every street.
Image credit :Pixabay.
