solid, “black and grievous.” She then describes them using thesimile of the gaps in an old woman's teeth. Apparently, the speaker is thinking of a particular old woman, someone her deceased loved one knew years before when she was still beautiful and alive with nerves “like palace fire.” She is not like this any longer. Time has passed. Changes have happened.

The poet’s purpose here seems to be to reflect upon the nature of grief and change. The figurative elements are quite appropriate. Wind does symbolize grief very well, and “nerves ... like palace fire” provides a vivid image of something that once was but is now lost. Notice, too, how the poem’s structure contributes to its content. Each short line ends with a period, a full stop, which makes the poem seem halting and hesitant. This is exactly how people sometimes speak when they are struggling to express their grief and to reflect on the mysterious changes wrought by time. Indeed, we can say that the poet does achieve her purpose, as she encourages her readers to think about what happens when someone dies and other people are left to cope with death and time and change.

An "apostle" is a true believer or, more specifically, a follower of Jesus. In the Bible, the apostles were sent out to spread the Gospel, so to be an apostle means that you travel among those you hope to convert. It also implies a certain kind of poverty; the original apostles were instructed not to bring any money with them but to rely on the people they went among for food and shelter. To be an apostle, then, is to be a person of great faith.

Carson doesn't mean "town" literally. "Apostle Town" is just one of many towns in her collection Life of Towns. In the introduction to that collection, she speaks of a town as an organizing principle, a place where objects or ideas are linked in a spatial way. They are, she writes, "the illusion that things hang together somehow."

So, the title, "Apostle Town," refers to an assemblage of ideas or images connected in some way to the notion of "apostle" —these include the ideas of absence, death, and separation. But also there are physical elements: the wind, shouting over the wind, the exertion required to walk against the wind, the road, the "empty spaces" that are somehow solid. Like the apostles of old, the people in this poem are on a journey spurred by a death (the first line of the poem, "After your death," is a bit ambiguous). The connection to the organizing principle of "apostle" is obscure, another of those "empty spaces" that are nevertheless embodied.

Anne Carson begins her poem, "Apostle Town" by using wind as a metaphor for the effects of grief. The speaker says that after the addressee died, "It was windy every day." The wind constantly opposed the speaker and the other people suffering with her. They not only struggled against the wind itself, but found it difficult to communicate with one another, having to shout sideways rather than speaking directly and clearly.

The spaces between the mourners give rise to another image to describe their loss. These spaces are like the "black and grievous" gaps between the teeth of an old woman who was once beautiful. This image describes another, more passive aspect of grief; something missing instead of something against which one can actively fight. However, even the wind is a phantom opponent, something against which people struggle as they walk, but which cannot be finally and definitively overcome, though it may subside in time.

In a short poem, Carson offers these two contrasting and complex images to highlight the effects of grief. There are other related themes in the poem, such as change over time. However, these two powerful images, which between them run through the entire length of the poem, keep the reader's mind focused on the central idea of the poem: the ways in which grief affects those who are left behind.