Dear Sue,
I don't know the picture concerned, so am probably missing a lot because of
that.
I had a problem at the start, L2 in fact. ie the assertion that alone is a
word 'beyond solitude.'
I feel you need to do something more than make an assertion like this -it
needed to be justified. The common saying " You can be alone without being
lonely" came immediately to my mind, which seems to contradict this
statement the 'alone' is as resonant a word as the poem implies .
I know there is a sort of general feeling that poetry is somehow allowed to
be 'vaguer' than prose - I don't agree with that.
Kind regards,
grasshopper
>From: Sue Scalf <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: new: The Only World She Knows
>Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2002 20:02:44 EDT
>
>The Only World She Knows*
>
>
>Alone is a word that rolls on the tongue,
>chokes the throat; it is beyond solitude,
>for it offers no choices. It is a landscape
>barren and bleak, gone brown
>with the last of the hay,
>winter soon to come. Here she sits,
>crippled, hair disheveled, one hand
>clawing upward toward the house
>on the top of the treeless hill.
>There is no sound but the wind,
>the whir of grasshoppers.
>Gray as the empty sky, the house
>with its open door calls her in.
>Ladders lean against the roof.
>She knows each room, the barn,
>the clothes line, the world
>from her window.
>All is clean, scoured with light.
>In the night, boards creak,
>clapboards ring with cold.
>Day and night her bones ache
>with a nameless desire.
>
>Based on Christina's World, a painting by Andrew Wythe
>
>Sue Scalf
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