Monday, April 12, 2010

Fourth Draft

See previous entries for the earlier versions.  Maybe it needs a title now.
This one even had intentional line breaks:

I never ride the train without thinking about you and how you died—
the lonely parking lot, your mouth on the gun, it’s something about
repeating the journey, the long trip back, after I had to identify
your body in the morgue, a journey with hours for sorrow, a window,
and regret: the golden light of dried grasses in the empty lots of Detroit,
a kind of resurrection, the return of a city to wild lands, to meadow.
At the top of a bare tree, a Cooper's hawk stares at military attention.
Later, a dozen, two dozen deer bound across a field
of last year's corn, flashing the arrows of their white tails,
maidens fearful of the monster on the tracks,
but swans seen from the window of this train, the swans
don't care, in inlets, in silvery pools at dusk, they are illegitimate sons
of the nearly-full moon, come down to this world to sip
from our waters, not the waters
of forgetfulness, no these cold waters are opposite of that.
I remember a movie I saw in high school, maybe
it was a movie I saw with you—the girl in the movie weeps,
she is talking to a nurse, she says, “I want to dance Juliet,
I wanted to dance the role of the swan.”

4 comments:

  1. Ooops- the line breaks didn't post right. But it's still a work in progress.

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  2. Wow. This has leapt light years ahead, & it feels completed in this form (even with the mis-posted line breaks). I love the inclusion of the movie reference at the end; the poem is brought together so very well over this; all the animal references now feel as though they have an even better reason to be in the poem than before. Not that they were out of place, it's simply that their places have been "earned" & become more of the glue that binds & connects.

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  3. PS/ Please read this at BOTH venues this week. This is my personal request.

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  4. Thanks for reading this at Book Cellar.

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