Kimiko Hahn's "The Ashes" and Complex Poem Structures

For my mentor poet, I chose Kimiko Hahn. I checked out her work pretty much arbitrarily, but a certain poem caught my eye, "The Ashes" . Even now, I have to say that I don't completely understand the poem. If you want to read it, just be aware that it is 80 lines across 14 stanzas. Not terribly long, but there is some pretty high diction ("reticent", "apoplectic", "intransigent,") which is not what I would consider a casual read.

After my first read through, I felt that chunking would not be the best approach. There was plenty of vivid imagery, but deeper meaning started to form when I began to relate lines from separate stanzas together. For example, take a look at the eighth stanza:

I tucked away our baby’s pink layette

in circumspect mothballs

for a christening that never took place.

As well, a doll that Auntie crocheted.

More than anything, I love tidal pools. 

On its own, to me, this largely read as just a scene, although the third line gives the sense that the speaker had decided to go against tradition, as their baby had not been christened (baptized). Let's compare this to the tenth stanza:

Winter stripped everything to the limb
and dejected nest. No angels, no crèche.
I don’t know whose recollections are suspect:
after leaving Maui, Mother learned to swim.
She loved tidal pools more than anything.

Here, we can see the recurrence of the image of a "Tidal pool", with similar meanings, albeit with reversed syntax. Here, the love of "Tidal pools" connects the speaker and their mother. 

As a whole, I think that this poem is about the speakers search for their mother's ashes (as shown by the ninth stanza's first line "I know her ashes are at father's") and remembering their mother because of it. beyond that, I have been unable to grasp any deeper meaning, though I think that there is something there.

The most interesting part of the poem is the final stanza, as most of its 13 lines either quotes or references each of the first lines of the preceding 13 stanzas in order, the exceptions being the sixth stanza, which is placed after the ninth line and references its second line. This messy visual might help with the connections:

And here is an equally messy highlighting of all the recurring images I noticed in the poem (link to the doc for better quality):

Anyway, that's pretty much all I could get out of this poem for the time being, but you can see why I found it so interesting, right. All of these connections and the structure of the last stanza really pulled me into Hahn's work.