> Hello Grasshopper,
                    This is an interesting read. After a first reading I was mainly conscious of the playing with the idea of closed endings and open possibilities. That´s a nice contrast and one to set the reader thinking. Then I started to think how your theme applies to both the poem and life. Then I began to wonder about how the poem actually works. I came up with a couple of queries that you can consider or bin depending as they make sense or not. I felt a slight contradiction in your theme, maybe even a disingenuousness, in this; that you say it´s all about possibilites, yet you exclude the hawk, the wind, the sea, the stars. Why should these be excluded? How have they offended? And I felt the poem left me somehow unsatisfied. It says it´s about possibilities but is it really? I think I would have liked to read the poem that presented the possibilities for me to think over rather than the one that told me the possibilities are there. It may well be that the scene you describe, with its alternative developments, suggests enough of those possibilities but I must say that I read them more as demonstrations of the thesis rather than as alternative narratives that I, as reader, am really going to mull over and develop in my own mind. If I could read the poem that really inspired me to do that I think it would be more interesting. And then there´s the question of the end. Your poem states that it´s all about possibilities until the end. And that´s the end, of the poem and of the possibilities presumably. It might seem contradictory. On the other hand, it might simply seem realistic. But then what of the thesis? The poem seems to invite an open-ended interpretation which it shuts off at the end. That may well be your intention, of course, and the possibilities are all contained inside the poem, before the end, but then those are the possibilities that seemed to be demonstrations of a thesis rather than real possibilities that the reader would mull over. And there I am back again at that point - after quite a bit of repeating myself. Well, I´ve put this all very clumsily, but I hope you can see how my mind was working. I don´t know whether this makes any sense but as I said, if it seems like wooliness rather than thought, just bin it.



Best wishes,    Mike



> From: grasshopper <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 2003/10/17 Fri AM 09:54:23 EEST
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: New sub: Take it from The End
> 
>      Take it from The End
> 
> 
> I can tell you how I don't want this
> to end. I don't want a red-tailed hawk
> circling overhead, or the wind moving
> through ash boughs, or anything
> about the sea or sky. Spare me
> the stars.
> 
> I can suggest how it could begin.
> I'd sit here on this green chair,
> with a coffee and a bar of chocolate,
> thinking about a dream you had.
> The dog would sleep on noisily,
> as dogs do.
> 
> Outside in the garden, insects
> would be scavenging the night.
> If it rains, the soil will heave
> with worms. I could step through
> the door, and smell thyme breathing
> by the path,
> 
> or I could sit on and drink
> my coffee, pick up a book
> and open it at a page
> about heraldry or pigeons
> or slavery in the Ottoman Empire -
> because it will all be about
> possibilities. It always is,
> until the end.
> 
>                 grasshopper
>