staying light
Salt on, take a cave and hide it there,
coral and the other side of surface
(break through from under
awakening I’m afraid of, heavy glucose
morning. It’s the gamut
in your marrow, ossifying
and fusing you closed. Captive,
by speaking, but it moves,
like driftwood, so quickly
(This was all I could do before Eliot woke up. Maybe I can do more later. . .)
posted by Unknown at 10:35 AM
3 Comments:
Kenzie (i hope you don't mind me calling you Kenzie), i love the surrealism, danger, and tenderness of a horizon moving away like driftwood, the heavy glucose morning, the gamut of words that's eliciting fear-- i like the dualities, trialities, complex, and wonderful: how language can be the subject here, and also the primal force moving the poem, and also the element within a human relationship that creates a distance between people. I'm curious, what were you thinking of when you wrote it, what were the first images in your head before you began to type?
Wow- thanks. You finally got a picture up! Now that I can put a face with a name, you can call me Kenzie :)
I was thinking about a few things, mostly about how oppressive it can be to be up so early in the morning, how heavy the sky is and how it feels suffocating, how most of the time I feel like I'm underwater and just want to break out of it. I suppose in many ways, that "you" is actually a part of me, the part that echoes the same sentiment of "trapped" that you expressed in your email yesterday. When I come up with a phrase or turn of language I like, I feel freed by it to a certain extent, but not for long, since the rest of my life often feels so restrictive. The part in brackets isn't part of the poem, but maybe it should be. . .you know?
definitely, i could see the part in brackets wanting its own poem, or twenty poems, or a hundred. There's a well there for you. Tensions between the beauty of a new life and its restrictiveness can fan out in so many amazing directions. And now when I go back and read it after knowing where you were, I think it's very much part of the poem, but wants to remain beneath it, far beneath it even, a submerged force moving your language and images five levels up, and it's the surface waves we're seeing. So much movement (in language, in poems) for me is about anxiety, moving to try to resolve it, to "keep things whole" as that Mark Strand poem goes. Your poem tosses and turns in language, as a kind of desperation or suffocation, and climaxes with the crisis of a horizon skipping out of reach. That's gotten me thinking about how much I like poems that build toward a critical point, but don't feel the pressure necessarily to resolve it. Like the poems are becoming small beautiful crises themselves to relieve us of ones we go through daily.
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