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| Bedview No. 4 (Dec. 11, 2014) |
he walks like a swollen finger
interrupted by a bat or a big black
butterfly. no orange trees
wearing yellow polka dots here,
each one a flaccid hand and
a wiggle. but, he says, a river
in the distant highway stream
and inside, an entire ocean
in a tiny fan.
4 comments:
:) I love this poem, D.
Thanks, S.!
This strikes me as the most image-motivated of your poems so far. There's not even a story, or a clear event, just three claims about resemblances. I like it. I wonder if there's a reason you chose this direction, particularly given the photograph you paired it with? I love all the folds in the blanket, it makes an ordinary item new and special, but the poem (though it employs ordinary language) doesn't seem to be just about enshrining the ordinary, like a Mary Oliver or a Billy Collins poem or something.
I think you're exactly right about "enshrining the ordinary." The photograph in particular is, as you pointed out, about the images and textures that emerge from the folds -- you can read it the way you read clouds on a summer afternoon. But perhaps more important is the overall form that it takes -- it has a square shape within the square frame of the photo itself. So in a way the photo is about creating order out of something inherently unordered. But the real kick is that the unordered quality of the folds comes not from something inherently unordered or complex (like, nature for example) but from a man-made blanket -- something simple that is intended to be ordered. So, in a way, it's mankind mimicking nature mimicking mankind. And this could be a way to read the poem too. But actually, the reason I was inspired to write a more "image-motivated" poem was because I had read your raygunsue post on "crude lyrics" which had me thinking about the possibilities of "crudeness" and more abstract connections in general.
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