Dear Terri,
    Thanks for your comments. This is a first draft which sort of came after
I was involved in a discussion on a (non-poetry) group, and I posted it to
see if it was worth working on, or too personal. I think Ann is absolutely
right that the mods and quals need more thought.
 The 'I' I was thinking of in terms of the shape of the slits in a cat's
eye. not the sound of eye. The phrase I was echoing was 'flies in amber'
 I'm sorry the last line came over as a sort of flip oneupmanship, -it was
more a sort of acknowledgment that of the unl;ikelihood of trying to argue
people out of their beliefs- everyone has to taste their own fruit.
Kind regards,
      grasshopper
----- Original Message -----
From: "alderoak" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, January 19, 2003 10:06 AM
Subject: Re: [THE-WORKS] New sub: Ego


> a philosophical argument beautifully put
> your second stanza, while on the surface countering the shamanistic view,
> has an interesting subtext in which the poet is projecting very human
> concerns and stories into the animals (kingdoms, Greeks...)
> It leaves me wondering - a poem for rereading at many layers
>
> a crit would be the use of 'I's to mean both 'eye' and 'eye'. I think I
> would have used 'eyes' and assumed that the reader would (especially after
> the ?twin brother cats), consciously or not, get the message.
>
> Another, I guess, is the last line. I dunno. After the complexity of the
> argument, it leaves me feeling that the poet has fled from their own
> ambiguity into a sort of smug philosophical one-upmanship, which doesn't
fit
> with the rest of the poem.
>
> Hope that helps
>
> Terri
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: The Pennine Poetry Works [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
> Behalf Of grasshopper
> Sent: 18 January 2003 22:37
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: New sub: Ego
>
>
>                              Ego
>
> A shamanisitic friend tells me solemnly
> about his astral journeys, of the passage
> through the ether that is not empty, but alive
> with golden energetic swirls, sparkling
> like dust-motes in shafts of sunlight,
> about his speakings with the spirits of animals,
> that they have souls untainted by ego, unlike humans.
>
> I think of a blackbird fluting variations of MemeMe
> into the growing dawn, the stallion coralling his kingdom,
> sly squirrels rolling requisitioned nuts like Sisyphus,
> the jealous cat who shoulders his brother aside
> to usurp a caress, his gaze twin 'I's in amber -
> but I nod . We all have our truths, our knowledge.
> Why shake the fruit from another's tree?
>
>                         grasshopper
>