i.
everything is
equal sign
something else.
terse statements
sound like a closet
falling out of itself
everything from
baseball bats
to winter coats
sit at your feet.
ii.
a frog along a tall reeded creek curve:
his throat strings vibrate
low inside a hollow neck
the sound of an untuned guitar
a long breathy noise,
moving away from my feet.
if he swallows enough fireflies
he would glow:
be impossible to hide.
iii.
this season
twelve dollars for a pound of cherries
sounds like a bargain
and shoes grow stale
as feet harden for fall
on soft asphalt.
cherry pits pile up in the pail
still red with the tendrils of flesh
that teeth couldn't gnaw away.
far from summer's shadows and
the long necked swans of narrative poetry
the gardener still tends his glass house
plants: yellow when
everything was green.
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kate-bo-bate.
ReplyDeletei really like this thing, as a whole. the first stanza is great and i love it. the second stanza is something that needs tightening, still, as is the third stanza--the fourth stanza is also great and i love it. (i just woke up so i'm pretty inarticulate now.) anyway, the third section/last stanza is da bomb too, but another example of place where needs tightening further YAH! (that's what olga sounds like. teehee!!) one little thing i'd do in the third stanza is change the first line from "in this season" to just "this season". starting out like you have it now, the diction is a little worn and imbues the coming section with that kind of tired drama, and also it might come across that way during an out-loud reading of this poem. also, maybe cut the "and" and "without" and "and" you have all alone on their lines. or maybe you can fill in the blanks there and write some new lines. either way, i don't think you need them all alone like that, and i'm not really sure you need them at all. "thinking that the asphalt is as soft as grass" is, for some reason, one of my favorite lines of yours. it's really beautiful, i suppose in the diction--kind of inwardly Shakespearean, and i'm not entirely sure what that means. ok, coffee time for me now. this poem is GOIN places, i think.