is all there was. The moving car
and the bar at midnight - both
me, as much as I'll ever be. And as for those
sad lost things, the shadows around
a planet's composite rings, the outline
of the iron dust a magnet lifts, the gifts
and the fire trucks, they too are here,
somewhere. Search through the pockets
of the memories I haven't got
and underneath the lesson plans pre-written
for what I've yet to hand
over to whoever's in charge you'll
find a guarded, secret place: here
is where You take shape.
i'll admit that i'm a little lost in this poem. BUT i do like this touch of cosmic (?)in the poem--the speaker comparing himself to other ordinary things but then your lists start getting more involved and surreal. maybe i'm saying cosmic b/c i love the part of the planet's composite rings and the iron dust a magnet lifts?
ReplyDeletei like the vulnerability of the speaker too. the second person You is off-putting, but I like how it shows how much the speaker has/doesn't have at stake--like nothing/everything are being treated the same? does that make sense?
i've never been to a reading that makes me think like this... so cool?
This being a poem by Tim, I'm assuming a Capitalized You means God. But I prefer reading it as if it doesn't -- the tumbling momentum of the second half of the poem is really fabulous, and I love that it's this combination of predestination by one's own hand and the oversight of an outside being that starts to allow the true self to emerge in the poem, by admitting that it is hidden. I'm reading that final You as still the speaker, but with enough distance to piece together memories and philosophies to start to form a full portrait of the speaker from the beginning of the poem, who is fumbling and aware only of an ill-defined Self, not a specific one.
ReplyDeleteIf that makes sense.
the You is actually Not God for once - though I hadn't thought of that and enjoy the ambiguity. 'You' for me was basically an attempt at saying 'Other' in a less pretentious way.
ReplyDeleteI was telling Nina that I was listening to a Mark Strand poem, and there was some line like 'Whenever I am in a field I am the absence of the field' or something like that, like his self is some cut out removed from the world. i thought that was pretty moving, so I tried to do the opposite - instead of defining the self through negating the everything else, defining it by everything else. but this is a very first draft poem, and i fear i went too far with the bits of rhyme.