Poetry of Torture?

The first thought that came to my mind when the class was told that we had to read not one, but two packets of poetry, was you have got to be kidding me! This will be absolute torture. In high school I never understood how simple words all grouped together could come together to make a story with so many meanings. There was always that one kid in class that would come up with an "off the wall" meaning to the poem and I never understood if we were actually reading the same thing, or if I was just missing something. So lets say I was not excited to have to read a bunch of short poems in a row...

To be honest, some of the poems made absolutely no sense to me, but there happened to be one that was more mysterious to me. In the first packet of poems, the poem Where it Passes, Untouchable really stood out to me. I'm still not to certain who the author is referring to in the poem but I really enjoyed the imagery that appeared in it. There are a couple lines that popped out to me. One of them was in the first stanza ending in the last line. "Stubborn as a mirror's tain, that gives nothing" I find that this was clever due to the fact that the tain is the back of the mirror, which is normally a solid color and doesn't give any reflection away. So with this object or person being stubborn as a mirrors tain, meaning they don't give anything away.

The next line that I found quite interesting is at the end of the second stanza into the third one. "Blood powdered my fingers, speckled my cuffs." When I first thought of blood I thought of the red, slimy, liquid form of it, so I didn't really understand how it could speckle the cuffs of his shirt. During the classroom discussion it was brought up by one of my fellow classmates that he thought the same thing I did, until he thought about when blood dries. When blood dries it creates a powder like substance, which then could speckle the cuffs of a shirt. 

I still don't completely understand the poem, I don't understand if he is fighting with himself or if he was betrayed by someone else. The imagery within the poem is powerful though. I can picture almost every single part of this poem. This was the poem that really stood out to me out of all the others. I still may not like poetry and I probably never will, but at least I understood some concepts in this particular one.