Ain't Burned All the Bright

Breath Two opens with more repetition as the narrator’s mother, brother, and sister continue doing the same things. The opening image is nearly identical to the image in Breath One—it depicts the narrator leaning back in a chair as he observes his family—but there are enough small changes to indicate that it is not a facsimile and has been painted a second time. This continues to build on the feeling of being trapped or stuck in time (the narrator is even painting the same things over and over now), further suggesting nothing will ever change. This stagnation begins to wear on the narrator and pushes him toward his breaking point. Again, there is repetition to drive this point home: his “staring at the television / [...] trying not to break open” (114); his brother is “trying to break his own record” (116); his sister is “trying to figure out / how to break free” (118); and the narrator needs a “break / from them all” (120). The problem is, that being confined to their house doesn’t provide the narrator with many opportunities for a break, and the one he chooses—checking on his sick father—is another source of confusion and anxiety.

The introduction of the narrator’s father brings in a host of new fears and concerns, and the narrator spends a lot of Breath Two trying to come to terms with his father’s sickness and what it means. The confounding nature of the cough is clear through the paradoxical way it is described. It sounds like it’s breaking in and breaking out, living and dying, breaking up and breaking down. The various weather and music-inspired metaphors he uses while trying to convey it also reinforce the notion that this is unlike any cough he has ever heard before. The imagery used throughout this Breath underscores how concerned the narrator is as well. There is an obsessive focus on the father’s chest and throat—there are numerous images of the father’s ribs, lungs, and heart, but none of his face—and the pervasiveness of storms, thunder, and tornadoes creates a constant sense of threat and danger. This is a violent cough that’s not only destroying his father from the inside but simultaneously tearing up their house as it blows through.

However, mixed in with the harsh imagery are brief moments of reprieve that indicate the narrator’s admiration for his father and just how important he is to the family’s sense of stability. When he peeks through a crack in the door and sees his father smiling, the imagery is of clear blue skies with fluffy white clouds; the same imagery is used again when the father reassures the narrator that things will be back to normal in a few weeks. Later, when the father is watching the news—the same negative news cycle as the mother—he “[looks] back at [the narrator] and [smiles] and [...] [holds] his arms up as if he’s holding [him]” (172-74). These last lines see the introduction of yellow into what has been a predominantly black and red color palette, as they are backed by the image of a bright yellow sun behind a tree branch. In Ain’t Burned All the Bright, yellow represents relief, hope, love, and connection to others, and it is a color that is strongly associated with the father, and later (in Breath Three), other family members too. If the black and red imagery reflects the way the various ongoing crises—systemic racism, the pandemic, and climate change—are continually encroaching upon the narrator’s psyche, then the yellow, along with the calmer blues of the clear sky, pushes back against that violent, imposing darkness.

Like the other family members, the father has a coping method as well: his is to suppress his suffering and discomfort while trying to support everyone else, again reflecting the theme of Coping With the Overwhelming State of the World. This creates tension within this section of the text, where the narrator feels relief in the presence of his father, but it is fleeting because he is constantly aware of his father’s condition. This ambivalence comes through most saliently in the imagery—the clear blue skies are just glimpses (through a crack or a small window), the image of the father hugging some houses when he tells the narrator “not to worry” has his head obscured by a cloud of smoke (148), and the yellow sun is quickly replaced by a thunderstorm as it becomes clear the father is suppressing a cough (128-29). Because of this, the narrator fails to fully recognize the lesson he should take from his father’s efforts to “hide thunder under thankful” (184-85)—that despite everything going on, the father remains optimistic and supportive because he never forgets that the people around him, his family, is what matters most. He finds strength and joy in them, and that allows him to keep fighting. The narrator eventually comes to this realization himself in Breath Three, but a lot of the groundwork is laid in his interaction with his father in Breath Two.

The abundant use of nature imagery in Breath Two highlights one other key idea: While climate change isn’t directly addressed in the same way that COVID-19 and systemic racism are (it's only alluded to in the refrain about how the news won’t stop saying we won’t change how we treat the world), a lot of the imagery that is used to portray the other two crises—being on fire, the billows of smoke and smog, flooding, and extreme weather such as tornadoes—imply that climate change and the disasters it brings are never far for the narrator’s thoughts and are a contributing factor in his anxiety. That he renders his anxieties through images of climate change reveals how deeply entangled all his fears are—these are all forces well beyond any one individual’s control or influence, but literally and metaphorically threaten his ability to breathe, nonetheless.