Could have been goblet, sulfur stink, the antelope's porous antlers. Bifurcation. In the new chill of morning, she noted how the roots of that flower were lifting themselves from the ground and sprouting new shoots, blooms. As it also grows deeper. But the geranium's second bloom is now shriveled and scab-like. A different interaction with the season. Your name, like an emblem, across the spice garden. We are saving the system, lifting our roots. With this, we will grow lighter and crawl.
Aside from the garden, I notice her weight distributing in the middle. Pooling around her wrists and hips. Inside the book, someone else's dedication, dripping with intention. The "y" as big as my pinkie. "L, to the one I'm loving. Yours. C." It is a gift, it is a death. The man on the phone knew my grandfather, and was sorry for his passing. Then he sold me a newspaper, which will come only on Sundays.
3 comments:
Wow. This doesn't seem quite like anything I've read. This would be a whole new direction for me ... I like the idea of weight carrying from the garden to loss to even the Sunday newspapers ... This feels a little autobiographical as well ... Who (and, maybe, what) are your influences for a poem like this?
This poem was an attempt to combine three totally unrelated images and somehow make them "do some work" for each other. The images are of the garden, the phone call, and the book inscription. I felt their connection, somehow intrinsically, and attempted to create some abstract sense of their relationship to each other. For me, they all contain some sense of loss and simultaneous living-on of that loss: the plant generating out of its own roots next to the dead geranium, the coincidence of the newspaper guy knowing my dead grandfather and commenting about it (the discussion/legacy of him lives on) and, for me most eerily, the inscription in the second hand book that I bought from Amazon for like $2.00. I created the fiction in my mind that the loved one sold the book because of the words of love, and even the words themselves are fleeting- as if to say, "I love you NOW, but not later." So they were all connected, these images, in my mind. I wanted to convey this to the reader, I suppose. But as I said, abstractly. . .
Wow. How cool. Where'd you get the idea to try that approach?
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