She stands on her tip toes.
Call them Greek feet. Before
the earth could support the weight
of your body on blades
could I hold you. Palms of
hands suffocating
your jeans while I wrench
God
from them. Could you stand on
Blades again. Tiptoe around
the chest of a stage
worn away by the rivets of nails.
I want to start with some salutation, but things are a little less formal on the internet than in a global commentary which reads more like a formal letter. Strange. I'll just say: Hey, Daniel.
ReplyDeleteOkay, anyway -- I just found something particularly poignant about this piece, more than just the attention given to knives, nails, pointy things in general, it seems to me that your attention to the prosaic element of this piece is definitely admirable, and should you choose to carry this further, would be one of it's main strengths. The spare couplets also call to my mind the tip-toe feeling I get from the first line as it carries through out the rest, that is until the lone last line -- whose sole nature gives me a feeling of emphasis by means of subtraction -- it drives home this delicate, high wire sort of sharp dance.
I enjoyed as well the sort of allusion to the Greek arsis (the long syllable or part on which the ictus falls in a metrical foot), which supercharges that line with that transcendent sort of significance we were talking of in class. The only thing about how you referenced it was sort of vague, as normal people know stressed or unstressed syllables in classical poetry as, well, stressed or unstressed, or, for the initiated, the ictus and breve (which are Latin words). I'm not going to be the person to harp on obscurity, but it'd be cool if this poem had more of a stage and scenery, should you choose to sharpen this up some more. Which reminds me...
I saw your journal post about the Common Raven as well, known for it's aerial feats, even though it clashes with the more basic connotation of Common. The Raven is definitely a common poetic sort of symbol, but all symbols can have a new change of light cast on them, they can be reinvented. The ballet vibe I get from this reminded me of Swan Lake (naturally), and I guess I'd like to suggest this sort of road to broaden this poem's horizon a bit more, again, should you choose to take it any further. It could be a sort of reimagining of a dancing muse by the speaker type deal, where the muse shows a sort of awkward grace common in everyone, yet has glimmers of that finer sensibility that make the stumbles more alluring.