hi falcon,

thanks for this week's OPP. any day is a good day for a love-lost poem.

in Don’t You Wonder? Brian Belknap comandeers the sensuality and flourish usually associated with blooming love and turns them plainly sideways. i like how he employs these things, now blanched and unsensual, to the demise of romance:
cherries this season aren’t nearly as sweet
and
...where the color goes
When the blush is off the rose
and
They pulled up the jasmine, the night blooming jasmine
That perfumed our front porch flirtations

Belknap trips, though, on some easy-to-avoid cliches:
the lingering taste of December’s goodbye
and the TV commercial replication of a homey sort of intimacy in the wearing of his shirt:
the one you said that you slept in
The weekends when I was away

he redeems the shirt with this deadpan metaphor for being off-balance, out of sync:
I’m barely able to button it straight

but of Don’t You Wonder?'s several shortcomings, i think this is the shortest. reading this piece without this verse improves it a lot:
Don’t you wonder where forever goes
When the tearful truth is told
Searching for another explanation

unless this is a song lyric, i think the rhymes aren't so useful, and neither is the repetition of "don't you wonder.." but, googling this guy i only come up with a sort of cowboy songwriter/ movie maker. is this the same guy? it works better as a song lyric than as a poem.

but to my reading, happily, the poem ends on the strongest image:
Don’t you wonder how the pea vine knows
To twist around the fence post when it grows
Searching for another sunny day

twisting pea vines is just damned nice, ya know? and it returns to this poem a homey wistfulness that got lost in some of the unimpressive middle.

monica

(be careful falcon. you start regularly posting OPPs and next you know you're asked to bring a dish to pass, next we're wanting to meet at your house. after a while, we're riffling through your refrigerator. there's no end to it, really. you'll be like, "how the hell did i get myself in so deep?" just be careful is all.)