Well, I don't know, I wonder if it is possible to say a critical word here. I've noted that generally the response to poems on poetryetc is
either silence or else a favorable pat on the back with perhaps a small suggestion for change. But I question this poem. Surely it is full of that worn-out language that made Pound and the Modernists necessary in the first place, by which I mean those hand-me-downs of Tennyson et al
"an ember of green," "vanished dews," "liquor distilled," "love's brief words." All somewhat expected. For instance can dew be anything other than what vanishes? is liquor ever other than distilled, and, well, while love might have long words, one might wonder then if it were love. The way each noun has its chaperone. So those "tiny fox teeth" surprise because they are fresh and unexpected. So my interest picked up, only to run aground on (pardon the mixed metaphors, it's contagious)"I wonder if the milk of her breasts is the milk of adders." This seems to me ridiculous. Not to say that I don't know about lactation and that breasts are sometimes full of milk but why should they be in this encounter and, really, to wonder if it's the milk of adders. This all seems that predictable male romanticism in which the feminine is exalted and dreaded. On the other hand, it reminded me of story about how bad English majors are because you'll have two guys in underwear sitting around ta!
lking about the possibility of canning and marketing breast milk. Maternal attachment and vipers! Well, not to cause offense, and I have tried at least to be funny in these remarks but had to say something,
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
The lady
>
>
> The lady's eyes are an ember of green. Would she take
> any comfort remembering vanished dews? Would she care
> for a draught of this liquor distilled from cobweb and moon?
> Will she bite off love's brief words with her tiny fox teeth?
> Is she parched for the skeletal clatter of lunar rain?
> I wonder if she feels I should decipher
> the angular pitch of the chamber where she dreams
> of a house with many faces like a crystal. Shall we review
> the erotics of the knife's edge? the network
> of eternity that howls in the nerves? the memoirs
> of a pool rippled by a slain magnolia at midnight?
>
> Perhaps she will recall the ghosts
> that crackled in her hair when she shattered the bowl of dawn,
> the sinews of wild colts that sang on the mountain in the dawn,
> the lone hyacinth that crumbled under her hand
> in the mist of dawn.
>
> I wonder if the milk of her breasts is the milk of adders,
> or if the flint of her ecstasy chips
> the cherried enamel from the basin of her smoldering trance.
>
> Or perhaps she'd prefer to yield
> the meteor of her exhaustion to the black sky of night.
>
>
>
> ==================================================
>
> Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
> http://www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
>
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