"Rooster" by Jim Harrison (314)

What first attracted me to this poem as I flipped through my anthology was the "beefy" text--in other words, the lines of "Rooster" are long and seem, to me, more like prose than lines of verse. Then I glanced at the first line which reads: "I have to kill the rooster tomorrow. He's being an asshole," so, of course, I had to continue reading the poem. So, I guess we have here a very effective, grabbing introduction. This is absolutely vital, because otherwise I'm not very inclined to read something--and I think most people feel the same way. After this first catching line, Harrison goes on to narrate a sort of dramatic monologue about why the rooster must die because he is harassing the chickens, and after all, he's really pretty much useless. He goes on for many lines (which are written in very prose-ish verse) reflecting on the many possible ways to get rid of this "asshole" rooster--from making rooster soup to:

Should I wait for a full wintery moon, take him to the top of the
hill after dropping three hits of mescaline and strangle him?
Should I set him free for a fox meal? They're coming back now
after the mange nearly wiped them out.

I think this is very effective because it is funny. One of my favorite aspects to this poem is the fact that the prose is (or, rather, the lines of verse are) very conversational. I noticed that this piece has a dedication: "to Pat Ryan," which makes me wonder about the relationship between the poet and this person. I also wonder how effective it is to dedicate a poem--like if reading that this poem is intended for a specific person will turn some readers off, or make them think that they won't be able to understand the poem's significance since we don't actually know either one of these two people.

After reading this poem twice, I'm still not actually positive as to what the poem really means, but I'm thinking that the ending should give me some information, so I will look there again. The narrator says, "I will tell him he / doesn't matter and he will wag his head, strut, perhaps crow." Does this mean that the rooster will act in a way to signify that the narrator himself doesn't matter? I guess that makes sense--that the whole point of the poem, in explaining that the rooster doesn't really matter, the narrator is actually using it as some sort of wacky metaphor for his own insignificance in the world. What do you think?