Thanks Max, Pat, Doug.
Max, I have noticed by eye 'surrounds' getting pinched on to the pillow, which is what I was trying to get at. I see what you mean, not really sockets. Just skin folds I suppose in the enclosing flesh. Tech term someone? 'Pouchily' is perhaps pushing it I see. I wanted to suggest loose skin stretching and hanging, so will think on that. But I was happy with 'springlessly' because muscles used to spring to attention and back. Now they take their own time about it and the old elasticity of movement is gone.
The final stanza is tacked on to the others and I can see it still feels that way. I was trying to make a 'secular prayer' of it but the wrench is too tortured. I'll work on it. Certain sorts of beauty, named or unnamed, Doug, seems to have the capacity to 'ride out' their surrounds, to be resilient, hence my 'bounces', contrasting too with flaccid muscles.
Cheers,
Bill
> On 13 Aug 2014, at 8:33 pm, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> poetryetc at this time of year is always quiet, I seem to remember -
>
> holiday and travel time for the northern hemisphere…
>
> Otherwise I expect by now someone would have wondered aloud whether
> pouchily
> and
> springlessly
> were maybe uncomfortable coinages from Bill.
> But let them pass…
>
> I have some difficulty with eye sockets changing
> probably because for me a socket is made of bone.
> The turn at line nine is welcome, yet -
> eight lines of ‘concreteness’ seem to me to call for a turn
> that does not lapse into a big abstraction -
> Hopkins poems have similar problems shifting from the experiential to the abstract.
> Is there a way for ‘beauty’ to be held over until we can sense what might bring it to mind.
> Lines ten to twelve don’t quite do this.
> Choughs? fussing and fossicking?
> sinister birds with sharp beaks.
> For you, Bill, but not for me.
>
> (Earlier today in the park I noticed a dead magpie - handsome but very dead.)
>
> Oddly I am about to post a verse snap with ‘beauty’ in it.
>
> Max in Melbourne
>
>> On 13 Aug 2014, at 8:04 am, Bill Wootton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> Compensations
>>
>> Cheeks hang baggy.
>> Face spills onto pillow.
>> Eye sockets fold and droop
>> forgetting former close bone cling
>>
>> Skin sags pouchily from shoulder
>> bone, as if from Brahman cow.
>> Muscles think before flexing,
>> withdraw springlessly.
>>
>> Yet beauty still bounces,
>> choughs fuss and fossick.
>> And tonight - so they say,
>> The moon will be Super.
>>
>> bw
>
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