Golden Ax Ending Explained: Home, Leaving, and the Limits of Memory

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Literal Account of the Ending

The final stretch of Golden Ax moves from a surreal, violent climax to a quiet domestic farewell. The poem “Bellum” (chapter 43) opens with an imperative: “If I take up the bow / What should we kill / How will we disappear / Behind the cypress” ([chapter-0043-chunk-0001]). It asks how to convince others “we are gone” and what to call mercy—an arrow to the bloodline or the keeping of names. The poem is raw, declarative, and unresolved, suggesting a willingness to fight or vanish.

In “Pre-Earth and Post-Earth Life” (chapter 44), the speaker returns to theology: “I wanted my co-eternal God to love me more / than they loved everyone else.” She admits her ancestors are imperfect and that God is “subject to / Continuous Revelation”—a loophole that allows admission of wrongness.

“Family Tree at Earth’s Surface” (chapter 48) describes searching for ancestors through archives, attics, intuition, and the self. The search ends at a “Nameless mother and her son.” The speaker compares the mother to the moon, a tide-maker. She loses the urge to keep counting names, finding comfort in emotional connection to the unnamed past.

The final poem, “Eden” (chapter 49), shows the speaker standing at a kitchen window washing her daughter’s dishes while watching an elk on a mountain. She questions whether she is home or just visiting: “I am through / with asking, I’m at the center of a cul-de-sac.” Wind hisses through aspen trees. She decides, “I’m really leaving now / moving through the told story.” The collection closes with the “Penguin Poets” list (chapter 50)—a bibliography that places Golden Ax inside a literary tradition, affirming community and influence.

The Climax: Violence, Disappearance, and the Choice to Stay or Leave

The book’s climactic moment is “Bellum.” It is the most openly militant poem in the collection, directly confronting the question of how to respond to erasure. The speaker takes up a bow (a weapon that appears earlier in “I learn to shoot a bow,” chapter 12). The tension is whether to kill, disappear, rename. No answer is given—the poem remains a string of questions. This is the collection’s highest dramatic pitch before the descent into theological reflection and domestic closure. The climax is not resolved by action but by turning inward toward genealogy and home.

Major Character Outcomes

The Poet’s Persona (Rio Cortez / speaker): She ends in the kitchen, aware she is leaving the “told story.” The speaker has moved from isolated girlhood in Utah (“North Node,” chapter 6) to urban life in Harlem and Washington Heights, through motherhood and fear (“Fear of Motherhood,” chapter 46), to a final acceptance of home as a place she can leave. She is no longer counting ancestors; she is moving through.
Byrdie Lee Howell Langon: Honored in chapter 3 as a self-published historian of Salt Lake City’s Black community. She does not reappear in the final poems, but her legacy of deep looking (“Far Enough”) informs the book’s insistence on memory work. In the ending, the speaker inherits Byrdie’s impulse to mine hidden history.
Paul C. Howell: The first Black police detective in Utah, addressed in “Questions of the Last Relative Slave” (chapter 34). He anchors the family’s pioneer story. In the finale, he is not directly mentioned, but his legacy of law, land, and faith undergirds the genealogical search.
Marion: Appears in chapter 14 with her 1982 Chevrolet Citation—a symbol of freedom and the threshold to adulthood. She does not appear at the end; the car and its association with becoming are subsumed into the speaker’s own journey.
Black Annie Hall: A character study of a Black woman navigating urban leisure and racial microaggressions (chapter 21). She is a contemporary figure, not an ancestor. Her story does not conclude—the poem ends with her driving the West Side Highway “top down, hair unmoved.” She represents a persistent, unresolved contradiction of autonomy and history.
Black Frasier Crane: A persona in chapter 38 who toasts solitary rituals. He is a lyrical interlude, not part of the narrative arc. His celebration of small joys (sherry, opera, squash) provides a counterpoint to the violence of “Bellum”—a private affirmation of pleasure.

Resolved vs. Unresolved Threads

Resolved:

Genealogical search: “Family Tree at Earth’s Surface” resolves the obsession with naming. The speaker stops counting, accepting the unnamed mother as enough.
Question of home: “Eden” answers “Am I home or am I only visiting?” with a decision to leave. The speaker is home and leaving—a paradoxical resolution.
Maternal anxiety: “Fear of Motherhood” (chapter 46) and “Maternal Instinct” (chapter 29) portray worry and ambivalence. By the end, the speaker is washing her daughter’s dishes—a concrete act of care, even as she walks away from the story.

Unresolved:

Violence and survival: “Bellum” asks what to kill and how to disappear but never answers. The bow remains an open question.
The beloved: The beloved of “My Beloved Finds Me Everywhere but Here” (chapter 39) is never named or reunited. The poem critiques the limits of metaphor and representation.
Religious tension: Abner Howell’s conversion and the LDS church’s racist past (Author’s Note, “As Cain”) are acknowledged but not reconciled. “Pre-Earth and Post-Earth Life” leaves God as “subject to Continuous Revelation”—an unfinished negotiation.
Ecological grief and nature: The elk in “Eden” is watched but not understood. The collection’s nature imagery (Millcreek, mountains, canals) remains ambivalent—beautiful but untamable.

The Epilogue (Chapter 50: “Penguin Poets”)

The book ends not with a narrative poem but with an alphabetical list of poets from the Penguin Poets series—over one hundred names, including Cortez’s own Golden Ax. This is a gesture of community and lineage. It refuses a tidy emotional conclusion, instead inscribing the book into a larger conversation. The epilogue implies that the speaker’s personal story is one voice among many, and that the work of Afropioneerism continues through literary tradition.

Reasonable Interpretations of the Ending

Afropioneer as perpetual wanderer. The speaker’s leaving in “Eden” mirrors the frontier movement of her ancestors—never fully settled, always moving. The “told story” is the family narrative that both confines and enables.
The impossibility of full knowledge. The genealogical search stops not because truth is found but because emotional connection matters more than data. The poem “Family Tree at Earth’s Surface” values the “nameless mother” over archives.
Domesticity as radical act. In a collection that includes enslavement, violence, and theological trauma, ending on a scene of washing dishes and watching an elk asserts that ordinary life is a form of survival and resistance.
Ambiguity of “leaving.” The speaker may be leaving Utah, leaving her identity as a pioneer descendant, leaving the reader, or leaving the genre of autobiographical poetry. The open-endedness invites multiple readings.

6 Reader Questions Answered

1. Does the speaker ever find her ancestors?
She finds a “Nameless mother and her son” but stops counting. The emotional resolution comes before genealogical certainty. She accepts that some names will never be recovered.

2. Why does the book end with a list of poets?
It situates Golden Ax inside a literary lineage, emphasizing community over individualism. It also mirrors the archives and bibliographies that preserved Black western history—like Kate B. Carter’s pamphlet and Byrdie Langon’s book.

3. What does the bow in “Bellum” symbolize?
The bow reappears from chapter 12, where the speaker learns to shoot. It represents agency, violence, and survival. In “Bellum,” taking up the bow is an open question: to kill, to disappear, or to rename? The collection never answers, preserving the tension.

4. Is the speaker’s daughter ever named?
No. The daughter appears in “Eden” only through the dishes being washed. Her existence anchors the speaker’s domestic life, but she remains unnamed—perhaps representing the future beyond the “told story.”

5. How does Afropioneerism relate to the ending?
The term, introduced in the Author’s Note, describes Black pioneers who imagined themselves into existence. The ending enacts this: the speaker leaves the given story and imagines a new position for herself—neither trapped in the past nor free from it.

6. What is the significance of the elk in “Eden”?
The speaker admits “I know nothing about elk.” The animal is a natural presence that resists allegory. Its indifference underscores the speaker’s decision to stop searching for meaning and simply be in the moment of leaving.

Thematic Resolution

Afropioneerism: Ends not with settlement but with movement. The speaker is leaving the family story while still washing her daughter’s dishes—an ongoing negotiation between past and future.
Identity and duality: The final poem collapses the duality of “home or visitor” into a both/and. The speaker is both home and leaving, both insider and exile.
Memory and ancestry: Resolved through acceptance of the unnamed. The impulse to count names gives way to emotional connection.
Ecological grief and nature: The elk, the aspen hiss, and the snow cup represent a natural world that does not answer human questions. The speaker acknowledges this and moves on.
Motherhood and fear: The earlier fears (chapter 46) of not feeling the “right” love give way to the mundane act of care. The ending suggests that maternal love is enacted, not felt perfectly.

For deeper dives into the characters and themes mentioned here, see our main book page, explore the poet’s persona, Byrdie Lee Howell Langon, Paul C. Howell, Marion, Black Annie Hall, and Black Frasier Crane, or check the theme pages on Afropioneerism, identity and duality, memory and ancestry, ecological grief, and motherhood.