"Tariff" by Michelle Boisseau

Reading the title “Tariff”, I assumed the poem was going to be about some sort of tax or an actual fee. I soon realized that Michelle Boisseau’s poem was much deeper. After reading the first two lines, “It takes time to appreciate how I once/made a friend so unhappy the next night…” (Boisseau 1-2), it immediately grasped my attention to figure out what may be the aspects of this poem.

Michelle Boisseau was clever to use the word “Tariff” as the title of her poem. There are multiple meanings for the word but I’m assuming she used it to mean a system of duty, although I’m not sure. If she did, the meaning is kept a secret and remains unexplained or unknown which caused a lot of confusion while I was reading it. She explains how her friend died in the poem by saying, “... she steered off her Fiat Spider head on/ into an on-coming truck” (4-5). The narrator’s friend has been dead now for more than twenty years. She then expresses, “What I did to hurt her I won’t tell you—“(8).  I think the poet presented those qualities of not actually giving an answer to why she writes this poem the way she did, to be able to arose the curiosity amongst the readers. May be she wanted the readers to figure out what she did. The situation sounds like she did something that was awful but then again it might not be so bad.

Another thing I thought was unusual was the fact that this wasn’t the first time the poet wrote about this, she explains, ”While I go about turning this into a poem again/ turning over heavy marl, and garden/ in spring, and the wind picks up, flinging soil against my neck…” (11-14). I’m confused to way she includes an illustration of her in the garden turning over marl which is a type of fertilizer, then how the wind picks up tossing the soil all among her facial area. I get the feeling that the poet is demonstrating that the narrator feels guilty for the loss of her unhappy friend dying.  It represents how she really feels and that she has to pay the price by revisiting the memories every now and then.

This poem makes me anger and annoyed just because it’s not straight forward. You have to be able to brainstorm and come up with your own interpretation about the poem. The two question I would ask is why can’t the narrator tell what she did to hurt her? And why is it such a big secret? The overall message that I received from this poem and the narrator was that if you ever feel like something is your fault you will continuously have to pay for it.
 

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However, I consider the poem as a serious work, for the reasons being that it’s a mystery. Putting aside all of my confusion and anger towards this poem, I enjoyed the concept of the poem and how the poet kept it obscure, not expressing the meaning clearly or plainly to understand, but for the readers to come up with their own perception.