I agree -- I like it a lot. Wonder how it would read if you tightened up
some of the loose verb constructions: Is gone, what's left is, it's not
just me who...that sort of thing.
Anny Ballardini wrote:
> What I think of this? superb, great work Kasper! There is a channeling of
> voices, a world of ghosts, the incipit and the end that brings to another
> beginning, and a clear young surprised voice that enters for the final
> twist
> with the I's (the narrator's) respectful awe in front of creation and
> grants
> honesty to the composition. A symphony.
> I might find some flaws at further readings, this after my second way
> through it.
> :-)
>
> On 5/18/07, kasper salonen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> this is a poem I wrote yesterday in something of a frenzy, small edits
>> have been made afterwards. I feel very positively about this piece,
>> but I'd love it if you petcers could have a critical look at it; I'd
>> like to send it off to a magazine I have high regard for, called Anon.
>> your attention would mean a lot to me. thanks.
>> (the word "treasure!" is meant to be italicised)
>>
>>
>> "white skulls"
>>
>> for eight days, an angular, bellowing machine
>> has pawed a gentle chaos in our garden
>> with the clumsy ease of a digging bear.
>>
>> the slight rise by the stranded bricks
>> of a failed flowerbed is gone,
>> the tangle of a rattled, flowerless bush
>> is gone:
>>
>> what's left is the groan of a damp land
>> released, having choked on the scuttled
>> bowels of its clay-mixed ship for decades.
>>
>> it's not just me who feels breathing ease:
>> the grandad-appletree, gnarled from birth,
>> fixes a different wind in its hybrid limbs.
>>
>> walking here, after the kind claw has gone,
>> is like touring a ruin¯except here
>> time is reset. sixty years evaporate
>> in the soil's softened, rearing-green sting.
>>
>> the far end is a new place, heaven
>> given slender thorns¯a bullace plum
>> swaying new, nettle-moat lost.
>>
>> at its root, cool dots on the kneaded loam,
>> are strange remnants: the first thought,
>> treasure! they are frail to see. to touch,
>>
>> more precious than bone. the ghost of a snail
>> left a goodbye-swirl on its abandoned mask,
>> then let it bleach: not in terror, or from dark,
>>
>> but from the tiny processes of dirt
>> that pressed the brown into their pores,
>> caused shining landshells to clicker up.
>>
>> I gather them like pyramid berries,
>> like ceramic mushrooms
>> made by infinite hands.
>>
>> their clack & stillness as I place them down
>> is that of the miracle of bones, the sigh
>> of thinning structures: white skulls
>> housing the sound of the world.
>>
>> KS
>>
--
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/
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