> Hello Bob,
            I´m feeling very frustrated because I´m sure there´s  something staring me in the face here and I can´t see what it is. I also feel a bit of a ninny having posted several obscure and cryptic pieces myself and now I´m saying `I don´t get this´. There must be some significance in the title. Why the ´ground´ floor specifically? The psychotherapist comes across as rather unhelpful or at least disinterested, so there´s irony in his/her claim to be helping. Who is the patient? It´s so impossible to guess that I conclude it can´t be relevant, but the therapist is addressing someone and in the absence of any other figure, I sort of want it to be either the absent `I´ of the poem or me, the reader, though the latter feels a bit far-fetched. I feel it should be significant that there is `more light´, as if the therapist is failing in illuminating his patient´s problem. And I´m puzzled by the word `strand´. How does it come to be associated with leaves? Is it supposed to refer to the leaves themselves? It could also suggest `strands of a story´ - the patient´s  story? And maybe the idea is that the poem is so open-ended that I can speculate to my heart´s content....which I have done, but with a sense that I would have liked at least a bit more of it, a bit more obscurity perhaps, to give me more to work and speculate on. 
I don´t know if any of this is any help, but I have grave doubts. Oh well.




Best wishes,     Mike



> Lähettäjä: Bob Cooper <[log in to unmask]>
> Päiväys: 2003/10/26 su PM 06:55:29 GMT+02:00
> Vastaanottaja: [log in to unmask]
> Aihe: On The Ground Floor
> 
> Perhaps I'm writing short-poems-only these days!
> And the words between asterix *are meant to be read as in italics.*
> Anyway, it's for C & C.
> Whaddya think...
> 
> On the Ground Floor
> 
> *No, I’m a Psychotherapist,
> not “A Shrink.” I’m here to help,*
> he interrupts to say then stares
> beyond, out of the window
> where there’s more light
> and the ash tree, its leaves
> falling incessantly, so many,
> each strand’s brief glint in the sun.
> 
> Bob Cooper
> 
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