How we cite our quotes: (Line)
Quote #4
God, that old furnace, keeps talking
with his mouth of teeth, (23-24)
Because of the way this poem has established a sort of structure, God falls in the same place where our speaker's brother and father were before. God's like the super father, the patriarch, the guy at the tippy-top of the family tree. Add on top of this the familiarity of the phrase "that old furnace," and we get a strong sense that the relationship between our speaker and God is in many ways similar, or parallel, to a family relationship.