Thank you so much for your helpful generous comments on my March poem... on ALL my poems. I'm very grateful for this group - so glad to be with you and your work, your minds and hearts (I'm never sure if people go back to the comments from previous months - I sometimes remember to and sometimes not - so I wanted to make sure you all saw this! I'm still getting the hang of Blogger...).
Happy spring - very much looking forward to reading your April poems.
Kasey
At Cape Henlopen
All night wind insists in the
trees, its unsteady hush
funneling us down into sleep
under the tender
shelter the oaks, even
leafless, make—all night
their trunks creak and sigh
and speak. Speak
to me—I
think the word protect until its
edges
dissolve, inside the tent
that wraps us
like another, thinner skin,
rocked and chastened
by the wind that doesn’t
cease: it ripped
the nylon from our hands as
we tried
to pin the edges down, make
the tent stakes hold
to dead leaves and damp and
sand, the tangled
ground that presses back
against our bones.
The ocean hidden but near:
all night I mistake
wind for waves, waves for
breath, imagine the blur
at the horizon where it
practices dividing sea
from sky, one blue utterance
from the next. I want
never to mistake you, though
I do it all the time,
though we wake and drink the
tea before
it turns cold. Later you
crush juniper berries and hold
your fingers to my face: gin,
that muscled scent
sun and forgetting keep
falling through. Later we walk
the town churchyard and read:
Sacred to
the Memory Of.
Fell Asleep. We walk in light
so steep I can see each
single stitch
of your gray sweater, its hem
and sleeve; see
for a moment how we’re
knitted together
in the wind that keeps
tearing us gently from our names.
Kasey, if I pasted all the parts of this poem that I love, I would be pasting the entire poem here! There are your signature trees, and a wind that blows though the entire poem. These particular passages made me gasp...
ReplyDeleteI think the word protect until its edges
dissolve, inside the tent that wraps us
like another, thinner skin
make the tent stakes hold
to dead leaves and damp and sand, the tangled
ground that presses back against our bones.
We walk in light
so steep I can see each single stitch
of your gray sweater, its hem and sleeve;
Light so *steep*???!!! Amazing!
And that last line!!! <3
My only question is a teeny-tiny one: in line 16, should once be one?
Thank you, Kasey, for this absolutely breath-taking poem!
Claire, thanks for this lovely comment... and for that excellent catch! Yes, once should be one... I fixed it!
DeleteKasey, thank you. This one seems pretty close to done! Tent skin, tangled ground, steep light, yes! I'm amazed by how much you manage to weave in loosely but beautifully here. Ocean sights and sounds, a horizon line you can imagine but not see, strangers dead and gone and buried in a small town churchyard. The poem seems to embody the chaos of the world a little bit, and the difficulty of really staying still or pinning anything down (including a tent) in the course of a highly dynamic life, but also embody the snippets of beauty that fly by.
ReplyDeleteVery minor hangup I had was here:
the nylon from our hands as we tried
to pin the edges down, make the tent stakes hold
I get on second reading how "make" is part of the infinitive with "to" at the beginning of that second line, but I didn't get it the first time. I wonder if substituting an "and" for the comma would make that smoother on a first read. Obviously just a thought.
Thank you, Kasey!
Kasey: such a wonderful poem that on the surface appears informal and discursive, but which grapples with very weighty ideas of life and death/ human connection and the not-human. I just got back from Arizona, and at the Grand Canyon, I had the same sense of not being able to tell the difference between the wind and the waves-- the wind against the canyons sounded to my ear like waves. "all night I mistake/wind for waves, waves for breath, imagine the blur/ at the horizon where it practices dividing sea/from sky, one blue utterance from the next." I love the 'blur' and the 'blue utterance'-- and the idea of the temporary shelter of the word, in a natural landscape that we suspect is somehow unforgiving. Dargie put it exceedingly well--'how much you manage to weave in loosely but beautifully'... The poem is really grappling with something very big and timeless, and so I don't feel as if it’s almost done, but rather that this is an early draft.
ReplyDeleteI love your use of the word 'chastened' (which suggests chapped and chased to me) . The inscription 'Sacred to the Memory of' –works very well, and adds an important layer to the poem, though I would perhaps think about omitting "Fell Asleep" -- The phrase ‘gin, that muscled scent/sun and forgetting keep falling through’ -- feels awkward to me each time I read it. “I want/never to mistake you, though I do it all the time”—I feel there is more to unpack here… an additional anecdote about pitching the tent, maybe … the masculine-gin/muscled/crush-… suggests something meaningful about the other, but I’m not sure what. I enjoyed thinking about this poem! Thank you, Kasey.
Dear Kasey,
ReplyDeleteThis is a really wonderful poem as others have said. You do such a wonderful job of interweaving multiple layers—linguistic, experiential, and otherwise. There’s a lot of intimacy that’s also complexly rendered—between the speaker and her lover (or at least an intimate one. I think the poem’s form does an excellent job of showing the collapse/conflation of forms that the poem enacts. I have a very SMALL comment re: the last line: the verb “tear” doesn’t strike me as particularly gentle. I understand “tear” (noun) as slight but the verb connotes something more violent. As I write this, I’m afraid I’m splitting hairs! Oh well. I wonder if something like “tease” could work, which would pick up on the sweater imagery right before it? Thanks for sharing!