Cake - Mark Strand

This poem reminds me of Robert Frosts "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." Both characters are lost in the woods, only I feel more detached from this one than I did for Robert Frost's character. I felt like I was actually in the woods on that snowy evening, and here I feel like I'm watching this man on a screen or something, but I'm not actually with him. What it reminded me of, is this story I saw on Dateline (because I LOVE investigative journalism) about this man who had been spotted walking along the beach somewhere...nobody knows where he came from, and he couldn't speak. The only thing he could do was play the piano like Mozart or Chopin...other than that, nobody knows about him, he just showed up randomly. I was hoping this character would be like that...it would have made for an interesting story.

What I don't get, is why it was cake that was the whole reason he got lost. Cake. Out of all things, he chose cake. Cake just seems so unrelated to the forest, so far from nature. It's almost discomforting. That discomfort goes along with the fact that this man disappears and then suddenly reappears a few years later without any transition between the two events.

And why are the waves of the sea black? It makes me think of muck and gooey water. Ew.

The only comforting thing about the discomfort of this entire poem is the way it flows. It starts with the guy going to get the cake, and then not finding it, getting lost, and then going back to get it again, to end up in his thoughts, where he was while he was lost. It just seems to flow really well, even if the poem doesn't make much sense.