Can't think of a title, but this is part of an upstairs meditation. It's very undone.
Black, jagged tar pieces
came dropping from the roof
and piled onto the driveway.
A furious pounding above: all day
the heat pressing down on furniture,
breathing through the window screens.
Footsteps of the muscled men,
the giant men, shaking the ceiling,
dragging their boots over our routine:
The blood of an Englishman.
Our cats could smell it from under the beds,
the dust of all our days clogging up
the drains and filling up the rooms,
which have never transformed once --
Not into closets heaped with small radios,
like in some dreams, or into
soundless swimming pools, from which
water disappears, suddenly.
They are as always:
stationary, too old to grow.
No dark attic either for the men to stomp through --
the sun exposing them, browning
their knotted skin with
a harsh, yellow eye.
3 comments:
this is so textured and fascinating, like a memory remembered in a dream.
i have several questions/suggestions: second stanza is beautiful and i wonder what sense would change if you moved the colon--"a furious pounding above: all day/the heat..."
as to the diction of "one two three" and the invocation of jack's giant, i think there is something unrealised there, which makes them seem a bit jarring. this rhythm is not that of breathing, or of rough shoes dragging on tarmac. that sort of nightmarish quality is conveyed well with the piles of tar, the weight of heat, the imposed-upon routine.
anyway, getting back to the surreal feeling-- is there more to that old dust? it clogs the drains and rooms, even as water disappears from pools.
it feels like there's something more there, in those rather wistful lines about the rooms inside the house, under the new roof, that will not change. like the men, they aren't exposed either.
what part do you think is undone? post old revisions too! =)
lol i feel so politely workshopped with such buzzwords like "unrealised." what formality!
your comments really helped. made some revisions accordingly. i agree the numbers and the noises were a bit much and didn't really do a lot for the poem, so i took them out. added a stanza. it's actually a poem about the men working on our roof over the summer, but kinda turned into a feverish dream poem.
mmm, today i am nothing if not uncharacteristically polite
i hardly have to say this, but don't get used to it
<3
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