This poem has a real beat and rhythm (although as a cardiologist might say, it is regularly irregular). And it's playful, full of little word games and alliteration. And yet, at only three verses, I want each verse to pack a punch. The middle verse, like a middle child, seems a little lost and insecure.

What's with the hospital? Do tubes and lube indicate someone's stomach is being pumped? Is this an unrepentant pill popper who's neighborhood tapestry has a stop at the ER woven into it? ("Fear the sound in both ears" = stethoscope?)

It is just vague enough to make me worried I'm missing or misinterpreting something. Two walks through the neighborhood seem to bracket a bigger event I can't quite wrap my mind around.

Backstreet barricade, arcane
balustrade, hidden kingdom of wing and prayer,
details too fine to miss or mess with,
skinny escape from a netherhood
of parapets and puddle soaked oaks.

Hospital palatial, shadows under foot and bed.
Time glacial. Fear the sound in both ears.
Tubes, lube, sudden exclamation,
declaration of unrepentance, remnants
of dinner untouched, rouged, hushed.

Scat tracks, crosswalk, bebop
haircut; moonshine, daylight,
pills not popped: no threats
to these daily threads I weave and weave.

It is the vaugness of the indie song lyric. it's just enough to give a sense of narrative arc, but no real story line. The best you can say is that it involves an escape from one place (1st stanza) a hospital and some sort of revelation (2nd stanza) , and some sense of getting back into the rhythm of life in the 3rd stanza. To go further than that is speculation and, I think, not the point. This is the twitter version of poetry: it evokes rather than defines.

It -

Stick to the title and how apt the poem harkens to the implications. There is a fabric underway here that the moving voice balances between loom and ironing-board. While this action may be personal, there are always elememts that pertain to the rest of us as fellow humans in the general scheme of things. The middle stanza, to me, merely brings uncertainty to the fore, a something beyond whatever the psychobiological components of the voice may be, a something with mixed probability that each of us is apt to incur along the way.

Had a thought that this poem could be set in New Orleans - not sure, however, that an intragothicum can be made to steam this notion past itself into a reality with subject and predicate.

And anyway, 'misinterpretation' has a fertility that never strays that far from horse and plough.

Best to you and yours.

Carpe verve.

Doug Mills, hillbilly at splarge...

Thanks, Doug, for serving in the military. I appreciate your sacrifices.

I’LL BE SEEING YOU by Jo McDougall

World War II is slipping away, I can feel it.
Its officers are gray.
Their wives who danced at the USO
are gray, too.
Veterans forget their stories. Some lands they fought in
have new names, and Linda Venetti
who deserted the husband who raised cows
to run off with an officer
has come home to look after her mother
and work the McDonald's morning shift.
William Holden is dead,
and my mother, who knew all the words
to "When the Lights Go On Again All over the World."

Thank you, MaryAnn, for the sentiments and the poem. Would do it all again. Voted for the nes Repub Govermor of Virginai. Plan to contact his office early next year and ask if he will, at least, use some mechanism that will allow me to return to active duty status for two weeks out each month to work in the infantry training classes a t Ft. Pickett, if not grant me a pin-point assignment in Afghanistan. I am still up to the task (knock wood). Well see sed the zincmeister...

Best to you and yours.

Carpe Verve Siempre.

Doug.

Shouldn't poetry evoke rather than define?

I posted something under MaryAnn's top post that includes my response to your question.

Good point...and certainly true.. I guess it would be truer (is that a word?) to say that I prefer poems that evoke TO define. Cooper's piece seems every evocative and that would be OK except I get the sense that he wants it to be more: the level of detail is so specific that it begs questions about the narrative.

Narrative? I found 2 that work equally well...or maybe the threads run parallel, and just repeat, daily. I guess for me the evocation stands on its own, or whatever narrative is intended is in support of that, and secondary.

Hi, OneArt - So vagueness is the new clarity?

Hi, B, Interesting that both you and soccerfreak were transported to New Orleans upon reading the poem. I've never been there (although feel it's one of those places probably everybody should go at least once).

Thanks to all for your careful readings of my poem. I don't often talk about what I intended in a poem, but because two readers associated the poem with New Orleans, I have to say that was the city I was thinking of, and trying to evoke, while writing this poem. I didn't expect anyone to see that, nor did I make any obvious references, so I'm delighted that that part somehow worked.

The poem is an unrhymed sonnet, and sonnets are almost by definition lyric poems, and thus a reader can't expect much of a narrative. I know the poem is a little hard to get at, but I was attempting to evoke feeling at least as much as thought, and to that end I was riffing on sounds, sometimes at the expense of obvious meaning. The poem is not a puzzle to be solved, but rather something to be experienced with all the senses, with an open mind, with negative capability.

I was attempting to evoke feeling at least as much as thought, and to that end I was riffing on sounds, sometimes at the expense of obvious meaning.

Hi Wyn,

Thanks for responding. Since you were here last week, I figured you'd be reading our reactions to your poem, but it's doubly nice when the poet of the week responds as well.

I'd like to ask you about your statement above. Are you suggesting that feelings are harder to express meaningfully than, say, actions? What are other correlations between sounds and feelings? Do you think certain sounds (hard K sound, for example) express certain feelings?

Mary Ann

Hey, I like your poem. It's a bit off the beaten track of what's been seen around here lately, and I'm a big sonnet fan.

Now that you mention it, I think the sense of a specific feeling in a specific time and place is one of the reasons folks found it song-like (or as some Buddhists would say, poignant).

I'm Alabama bound
I'm Alabama bound
And if this train don't stop or turn around
I'm Alabama bound

Cheers.

Hi, Wyn Cooper, What an absolute pleasure to have you here to comment on your poem. I'm glad you confirmed the setting was New Orleans -- two readers here should be feeling particularly astute. And I promise I'll stop trying to interpret it! (It's a bad habit of somebody who reads too many mysteries -- not everything is meant to have a solution.)