Another Mystery

The poem, “Another Mystery,” shows how a young boy’s perspective on death changes as he becomes older and more mature. The poem begins with the image of the speaker at the dry cleaners with his dad and he says, “What’d I know about death?”(2). After his father comes out of the dry cleaners he said, “This is the suit your grandpa is going to leave the world in”(4-5), and the speaker, “touched the plastic,”(7). Next there was, “a long interval”(10), in which the speaker is growing up until his father is dressed in a suit a the speaker thought, “He was dead, wasn’t he?”(17-18). Then, the speaker begins to talk about how an hour ago, “[He] picked up [his] own suit from the dry cleaners,”(23-24). Finally, the speaker rips through the plastic covering the suit and, “held it—the rough, palpable fabric,”(29-30).