Why is this poem so good? Because the speaker/author's ideological predispositions do not preempt authentic poetic discovery--the discovery of connections between the feel of her individual life and, in this case, objective, historical and economic facts, discovery which is directly carried over into the poem's language and structure, a structure which, by matter-of-factly in a catalogue format juxtaposing such items as "daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion . . . gratings as there are in liquor stores," not only links oppression inevitably with bourgeois life but also reveals the profound banality of such evil, a banality epitomized finally by the ears "like dried peach halves" in what might be the Salvadoran equivalent to a brown paper Safeway shopping bag. The poem is "analytic" in precisely the sense that the Simpson poem is. Instead of delivering us a conclusion, it renders the process of analysis itself. Indeed, Forché herself seems to sense how much it is authorial discovery after "pen" has been taken to "paper" which lends this poem its power. Introducing it, she characterizes it as "almost a poeme trouvé." Of course, "The Colonel" is nothing like a "found" poem. The "found" poem simply rearranges some nonpoetic discourse as verse, whereas this poem not only lacks verse, but it is in Forché's own words. It is "trouvé" in a more profound sense, in the sense that all excellent poetry is. In its genuine wonderment and curiosity at the details of the colonel's household, at the way in which bourgeois banalities are stored so casually side by side with the trappings of oppression (as if those furnishings naturally belonged together), it discovers and renders these connections more forcibly than any ideological statement could.