--- Alkuperäinen viesti ---

Hello again Carl,
                 I´m rather surprised, after your strict reading of other poems, to find that your own style is quite loose and free to the point of being semantically inaccurate. I´ll take just a few examples. `gauze´ in line 2 is a woven material and that aspect of its structure it seems an odd word to use in connection with ice which cannot be woven. The phrase `years of ballroom´ conveys nothing to me either in a literal sense (which I had understood was your test for the validity of a metaphor) or in a metaphorical one. At a push it could stand for an awful lot of dancing and junipers in the wind might be described as dancing but this would be a rather hackneyed image and I think the use of `ballroom´ rather than the word `dancing´ confuses the image. If that is what you intended. 
The word `drape´ which you use in S5 requires a preposition and object. You drape something over/round something else. Or something is draped over/round something else. Or something is draped in something else. But `snapped arms....drape,´ doesn´t work in any way that I can see. 
In what possible way or sense can the air be `antiseptic´?
Finally, you seem not to have been able to resist finishing by telling the reader what your conclusion is - `(this is) a trial much greater than the self´. I don´t have a problem with such conclusions, but I thought you did.
I hope these comments are helpful.


Best wishes,   Mike




--- Alkuperäinen viesti ---
Maroon Knots

Junipers stare
through a gauze of ice
after years of ballroom
with their partner, the sky.

Once breath sought roots,
to move in meditation, to linger;
cluster leaves longed to tickle
robins, chickadees.

Rings rupture: broken applause.
Empty nests tumble: frozen memory 
holes. Branches whisper
and stretch to rest
on dirt, that old friend, old

source, encountered oddly,
resistant in these changed
times. Snapped arms still

held by a tendon 
drape, brooms 
that volunteer to sweep 
themselves. The wounds 
show surprising color 
in the antiseptic air,
a view
made coldly evident.

I dare not touch the exposed 
lumps of translucent green,
pugnacious, begging a release 
from unguessable bent, 
a trial 
much greater than the self.