like planks shuffled over the rooftops.
I placed my hand on the stair-railing
as I walked up the stairs just to feel
the railing. Someone called
my name. Only, it wasn't anyone I knew
and it wasn't my name either.
I thought about the lightness
of great things, like feathers,
and souls, and tried
to compose a poem where
the sky was a levee, broken apart,
like eggs with the yolk spilling over
the rooftops, and everything.
this has a groggy, hallucinatory quality to it that feels very morning appropriate and i love it. starting with the floor ("planks"), which is where i imagine the narrator staring and noticing the sun spilling in. and then it builds up to the source, with a weird organic, constructive swelling in the language; i'm a sucker for lines that work the way "I placed my hand on the stair-railing/as I walked up the stairs just to feel/the railing." does -because this kind of phrasing moves the action of the poem forward by atomizing language, breaking apart a composite phrase and inserting bits of narrative around it. there's something incantatory about repetition that moves action forward in this way.
ReplyDeletethe one section i'm not too keen on is the part that talks about "and tried / to compose a poem..." mostly because you have wildly succeeded in doing so and i don't think the poem would lose anything with its omission. it doesn't not work - abstractly, i'd like to know why the trying is important and what the cost of failure might be or is.
more to come
i agree with ian -- this poem only needs one poem, the thought of the second poem weighs it down, not like feathers.
ReplyDeletelove the stair-rail part. i'm with ian and dinah here--no second poem. i think a second poem mention would add to much consciousness to the speaker, and take away the slow but heavy feeling in the poem.
ReplyDeleteso, i really appreciate the comments, but i have to say i like the poem part in there... in an abstract sense, beginning with the mistaken name and growing through the "I thought" is an attempt at creating a psychology for the morning prayer which already has its outward eye.
ReplyDeletei feel like im arguing a lot... hopefully you guys don't mind. i really love hearing disagreements because it forces me outside of the writing-moment, and i'm ready for you to take up the side of 'no 2nd poem' more.
I really like this disoriented voice you have going on in your poems lately. Things both are and are NOT, days repeat themselves, voices call names that are not your name.
ReplyDeleteYou might find this interesting: http://yupnet.org/siken/2008/03/18/7/
do NOT ask me what it's about, but it has that same sort of disorienting voice about it. and you get the sense that what's going on is not so much important as the alarm in the speaker's tone.