Analysis Of Gary Short's Poem Stick Figure

Gary Short’s poem Stick Figure is a deeply personal piece that speaks about going through a stage of grief after losing a loved one. The poem evokes the nothingness that one faces and the longing to make the inhuman human once more. Ultimately though, the piece conveys the emotion that makes us human and how even the two-dimensional can be made three-dimensional when the smallest bit of emotion is added.
The opening lines of the poem paint a picture of a bright forest in autumn, when the leaves are just turning red and nature is preparing for the coming of winter. However, this forest is empty. The “light in the nothingness” (line 2) is an image describing the way this person feels and the grief that now stares him in the face because of the cremation of his father. His father is now “dull cinders and grit” (line 4), something that is no longer human, and yet the author wants to look at the ashes as though they are still human. When he sees the “round

pile of ash” (line 5) after pouring some of the cinders onto the ground, his first thoughts are that of a human head, a drawing and more specifically, a stick figure.
He begins to shift through the ashes, pouring more out over the ground and “[trying] to give him human shape”(line 10). In order to deal with the grief, this emptiness he is faced with, the author attempts to make his father human again by using the ashes to create “an ideogram” (line 11) or a symbol to remember his father by. This symbol happens to be “a simple stick-figure of a man” (line 12). However, a stick figure is not human. It is a crude shape, a childish shape, with a head, long arms, and straight legs. This symbol goes further than just making a human out of what is already gone. This symbol shows the son’s own childness in facing death, and the way he begins to coup with the loss. There is nothing human about a sick figure, and yet there is something three-dimensional that this person wants to get out of the shape. However, a stick figure is not three-dimensional. It is the epitome of two dimensions, being a bunch of lines thrown together to make a rough outline of something that represents a human.
The author admits to wanting to “have drawn [his father] as a kid” (line 15), but at the time he doesn’t have the supplies to draw, be them literal or figurative.

Instead he drew his father as a child would, as a stick figure, suggesting innocence and the feeling of being a lost child after the loss a parent. Once he is finished with the ashes and has completed the shape, the author wants to add something to the figure in order to give it that depth that he longs for. The depth he could give a picture or drawing if he had “a big lead pencil/ [and] grainy first-grade paper” (line 16-17). And so author decides to “give him a heart” (line 19). In order to add a heart, something stick figures are rarely given, he adds “a fallen red leaf” (line 19) to the ashes. This leaf animates and adds to that depth and the dimension, not only with its texture and color, but with the emotion that is placed behind the leaf. This leaf also ties his father to the earth where together they will fertilize the trees once winter and

passed.
Looking back in the poem the author added a dash after his line, “I made an ideogram” (line 11). A dash suggests a change of thought or expanded information on the topic. By the end of the poem, however, another dash is not present, thus a shift back to the original topic never occurred, or the explanation was never closed. So the question remains, was the stick figure there? Did he really create an ideogram for his father? Yes he poured out the ashes, but whether a stick figure was actually formed out of the ash is never clear. This explanation also extends to the leaf, for the dash is never present before or after the last line of the poem. So did he really add the leaf?
By adding that leaf to the simple and rather crude stick figure, he proceeds to make this drawing more human than inhuman. This simply goes to show that the depth and dimension of humans goes beyond just being creatures in the third-dimension, it speaks to our emotion, which makes us deeper than any trench and larger than any tree. What it takes for us humans to be humans, to be deep creatures of thought and being, is the emotion with in us. Without emotion we’d be apathetic individuals, running on logic and basic needs for survival, and then what would we truly be? This leaf also shows that nature is what brings out emotion, and also that nature ultimately completes us and ties us with everything around us. And that nature is both the physical words around us, and the inherited traits that pass through our DNA. The fallen autumn leaf represents that emotion, and the tie that it has between all things living and everything that has passed.