this poem then - what I am struggling with is the cosy domestication of the
task of living on this planet, as though it were something as simple and
unproblematic as polishing the brassware and can be figured by the domestic
work of women who launder clean and praise their children. (Where do these
women live? In the sick fantasies of the culture....)
It has to be loved as if it were embroidered
with flowers and birds and two joined hearts upon it.
the metaphor just doesn't work for me - whoever _loved_ anything with
flowers birds and hearts embroidered on it? The description encapsulates
the bottom drawer of a 1950's bride-to-be (radiant and blissfully happy!)
Is a description that can in any way match or describe an appropriate
attitude to the earth we stand on, the water we drink, the air we breath?
the sheets of lake water
smoothed with the hand
and the foam of the oceans pressed into neatness.
Excessive prissy and inappropriate attention. A kind of fussing that seems
to me deadly! Devastating manicured hand of order passing over the waters
saying let there be
pleated and goffered, the flower-blue sea
the protean, wine-dark, grey, green, sea
with its metres of satin and bolts of brocade.
rich - delicious fabrics - I want to dress up and put in my pearl earrings
at this point
And sky - such an 0! overhead - night and day
must be burnished and rubbed
by hands that are loving
sexy - but don't waste all that attention on the sky!
Archangels then will attend to its metals
and polish the rods of its rain.
Shame! I thought she meant lesbian sex.
Seraphim will stop singing hosannas
to shower it with blessings and blisses and praises
and, newly in love,
we must draw it and paint it
our pencils and brushes and loving caresses
some music in the language and form here that I like - could go quite misty
eyed at this point. A kind of B Movie effect fogging up. And I am
interested in the method that has been described of responding to rememb
ered reading - certainly makes more sense of the way Neruda is used - would
have been kind of nice (for UN type purposes n'all) to have the original
version.
the poem takes a pretty and rhapsodic approach which invites parody and
just does not have enough internal gravity for this reader
my pennyworth
Liz
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