weeks, but not even the precision
of moments buried
the smoking ash of a fire we
never expected to see the end of. Like the dull wake
at the first line of movie credits.
We blinked, and rubbed our eyes.
I bought a notebook.
You helped rip the pages out.
This is really compelling, but if you're going for clarity (which you very well may not be), I think we need a little more to make the leap from the need to capture/understand time after the meteor, to whatever is going on in the last two lines, which I do not understand but am moved by. Maybe this can be solved by clarifying the relationship of the "we" early in the poem? Or not clarifying, but troubling in a way that clarifies?
ReplyDeleteAlso makes me want to quote Joanna Newsom:
ReplyDeletehat the meteorite is a source of the light
And the meteor's just what we see
And the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee
And the meteorite's just what causes the light
And the meteor's how it's perceived
And the meteoroid's a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee
Im thinkin i shouldn't have used the word 'meteoric' in the title... i can see now that it provides a clear object for the poem, which is distracting from what i want at least.
ReplyDeletethis is another attempt at the 'documenting the end of the world' poems, and so one of my goals with these poems is for there to be a center-object of each poem, a Point, that continually avoids conceptualization. but that said, i don't want that to be an excuse for arbitrariness, and i do agree that the last two lines might be a bit abrupt.