I'm with Ken on the interpretation. powerfully personal, sensual/sensory
mirages of memory & illusion.
I would also offer the opinion that the poem is in a rather prose-like mode,
and that mystifying that mode in the slightest might enhance the "ickiness"
in its powerful, animal nostalgia. the imagery gets a little caught up by
the narration here.
I can imagine this scenario, of making a souvenir or reliquary of something
banal and immediate, "still warm" as it were. my nostalgic devices are more
distant, I need time and space between myself and my object of reminiscence.
KS
On 22 January 2010 21:57, Ken Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Janet Jackson wrote:
>
>> This gets a bit yucky. Be warned!
>> Comments on poetics are welcome.
>>
>> *thin*
>>
>>
>
> Good grief. For ME this is one of those poems you sense rather than read.
> It has all the desolation of a Hopper painting: "Morning Sun," or a
> mid-Sixties Dylan song (Tom Thumb's Blues) It feels (my own call) like the
> most desolate place on earth: the empty bed that a couple of hours ago was
> undulating. "He was so hot." And then he is so gone. I feel devastation, the
> field of tares without wheat. Someone published a book years back, a nice
> potboiler read called *The Weight of Water*. So this one is *The Weight of
> Semen*. I'm not being funny. The poem is not being funny.
>
> The human contact, the intimacy, is not there. Can someone be "hot" but not
> touch you elementally? I don't think I like the answer I'm getting:
>
>
> He was so hot.
>> From the drawer by the sink
>> I get the big scissors and, not knowing
>> what will happen, make a small cut
>> near the end of one condom. His come rushes
>> onto my skin, cool, amniotic,
>> albumen-clingy, thin, slightly
>> distasteful. I wouldn't lick it,
>> now.
>>
>> The kitchen is chill, silent, scentless.
>> I raise the hand, inhale:
>> musky, grassy come-smell
>> tainted with latex.
>> I can't smell *him*, only
>> an abstraction.
>>
>
> Whether I'm reading into it...these last lines cut deep:
>
>
> The life I didn't want
>> runs over my hand into the bin.
>>
>> Before I can do anything
>> I have to wash it off me.
>>
>
> The question the poem does not ask: "What have I come to?" Maybe I read it
> wrong. It still hurts.
>
> Ken
>
> --
> ----------------------------
> Ken Wolman
>
> http://awfulrowing.wordpress.com
> http://opensalon.com/blog/kenneth_wolman
> http://wearethecure.org/friends/cids-memory-p-394.html
>
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