More a video, Richard, but I like the largeness of the gestures, & the
way the syntax carries over & over.

I suspect you'll maybe edit it down a bit as you revise, but if so it
will require a careful culling of individual words perhaps, by which I
mean I found the sameness of linelength telling by the end.

How to write an autobiographical poem? How to make the story hold: that
the temporal shifts are those of the mind remembering, not so carefully
organized as too often it's presented. That you make that apparent...

Doug
On 14-Dec-05, at 7:42 AM, Richard Jeffrey Newman wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> This is an excerpt from a long poem I am working on--it's about 10
> pages
> right now and I am beginning to see that it's coming to an end. But I
> think
> the beginning holds together rather nicely. I'd be curious to hear what
> people think.
> Two notes:
>
> 1. NCSY=National Congregation of Synagogue Youth
> 2. Shabaton=a Sabbath celebration, which means from Friday night until
> Saturday night and sometimes Sunday morning, sort of like a retreat
> weekend.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Richard
>
> from Until I'm Falling Into Emptiness
>
> I watch you walk away from the first sex
> we've had in more months than either of us
> would want to admit to, and you don't hear
> the breath that catches in me at the light shining
> from the full nakedness of your back, as if
> your skin had taken in the long brightness
> that held us as I held you holding me,
> and now that the sun has moved past our window,
> it is your body that illuminates this room;
>
> and from the garden downstairs that is a garden
> I have carried in me since I was younger
> than the little boy we made (whose time at camp
> granted us these hours, and we made him here,
> on this bed, on Valentine's Day, and since we
> had not stopped to calculate the months,
> as you at first had said we must, his birth
> began just as you put the first piece
> of the cake I'd bought to celebrate the day
>
> you were born into your mouth, and your parents,
> too, are out of the house, gone to learn
> on 37th Avenue the English
> they will need to survive here, now that here-
> this land, these rooms-is where they make their home);
> from that garden, children's laughter, an adult's
> call to someone not to swing so high
> and the same squeak from when I was Shahob's age
> of the swing itself, a rusty metronome
>
> keeping the beat of my life in Jackson Heights,
> where I never thought I'd live; from that garden,
> the sound of my own voice calling to me
> from thirty seven years ago (my father
> living the life that led him much further
> from me than I'm sure he ever thought it would take him,
> my brother still alive and innocent,
> and my sisters not yet even seeds
> in the future my mother and the man who'd be
>
> their father had just begun to imagine,
> and his name was George, but at home we called him Dad:
> my mother's revenge for I'm still not sure
> what my father did to deserve it); that boy,
> I know his voice, and I know he's calling me,
> but it's as if he speaks a foreign language:
> my name is the only word I recognize;
> the rest is a song he's singing, a melody
> I start to hear as one of those we sat
>
> in a circle and chanted at each NCSY
> shabaton I attended, and I know
> that isn't possible, because the boy
> in the garden has not yet had to face the choice
> he will later think he has to make between
> the path he will be taught the "one true God"
> he would believe for many years was whom
> he had to please to purify himself
> wanted him to take and the one he wanted
>
> for himself-but even then, in the garden, he knew
> he was stained; and one path, the rabbis would say,
> the one his Jewish soul was yearning for,
> meant resurrection and the world to come,
> while the other could only mean that death was death;
> from that garden, in that boy's voice, the root
> of each choice in love that I have made,
> and I have chosen here and how with you,
> but here and now is also there and then,
>
> and there and then, and her and him and them,
> because this love with you contains them all.
>
>
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320

My roof was once firm
yet now it cannot even

keep the stars out.

Christopher Dewdney