Secondary Compensations?
Compensations
Cheeks hang baggy.
Face spills onto pillow.
No close bone cling.
Shoulder flesh sags
like a Brahman cow's.
Muscles think before flexing.
But choughs still fan,
fuss and fossick.
And tonight,
so they say,
the Moon
will be Super.
bw
14.8.14
> On 14 Aug 2014, at 1:45 am, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Just back form a trip, & tired this ay em, but I kinda have to agree with Max, Bill. Is there a way to suggest all that beauty without naming it such?
>
> And ‘sockets’ doesn’t work, really…
>
> Though I certainly get the main thrust of the thing; living it…
>
> Doug
>> On Aug 13, 2014, at 4:33 AM, 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
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> Recent publications: (With Sheila E Murphy) Continuations & Continuation 2 (UofAPress).
> Recording Dates (Rubicon Press).
>
> Something else is out there
> godamnit
>
> And I want to hear it
>
> C.D.Wright
>
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