This is a great great poem. Unbelievable. I’m hoping you see what’s in it, and I apologize for the rather pedantic construction that follows. I’m not in any way trying to shackle you to my reading of the verse, and none of my suggestions, of course, matter all that much. I’m only writing this for fear that maybe you don’t see what you’ve got, because that would be super sad.
What’s special about this poem on the macro level is friction of time moving in two different directions, the interplay of predatory and precious voices, and the torque of hallucination against imagination. The narrative setting is powerful and evocative, at once fulfilling and desperately lonely.
Aside from those forces, you do an excellent job working toward micro diction effects. To explain by analogy, I’ve read that Shakespeare “invented the sound of eloquence” by pairing Germanic and Latinate words. For instance, from Sonnet 118, “with eager compounds we our palate[L] urge[G]” and “Thus policy[L] in love[G], to anticipate[L] / The ills[G] that were not, grew to faults[G] assured[L], . . .” This poem works its diction in a similar but unique way.
To summarize the narrative: a woman is being seduced. At first she resists, but then her resistance fails. It is unclear whether the outcome is traumatizing, retraumatizing, or welcome. That interpretation, invested with the imagery you’ve given, yields this narrative: A woman, threatened with or else merely vulnerable to seduction, regresses from a lively virgin into something like a mummy, passing backward through time into something deeply primitive. This suggests that she is life and the “impending lover” death, but that isn’t necessarily negative, as discussed below. Finally, in light of a more sensitive interpretation, this poem is apparently double-voiced, the one being persephone and the other hades voicing, speaking their various lines separately, in a manner suggestive of wedding vows. This interpretation is available if the lines are parsed in terms of giving and taking, such that “the illusion of it as peonies bloom[s] in my palm” would be her line and “I’ve taken your eyes. / Brilliant satellites.” would be his.
This dual nature, of course, could be invested in a single speaker, and I assume that was the author’s intention. Nevertheless, the poem is sturdy under the interpretation above, lending it no small degree of depth.
Problematically, the punctuation below seems gingerly advanced, as if the author is scared of convicting herself too much to what the poem is trying to say. I’ve written out as full a proofread as I can, but you’d be fine to just skim it. I think it makes the point I’m after, here:
Proofread.
vision caused by an impending lover
--consider “Vision caused by an impending lover,” for consistency. Compare, “A thousand tiny white bones,” and “A museum of intricate disasters”
I’ve become too narrow.
Autumn still aches in my rib cage. Nowhere near dying,
just the illusion of it as peonies bloom[s] in my palm.
--I'm sure that [s] isn't what you want, but my ear wants it, and so I thought to point it out
Pink, always pink[,] like the first time you saw me,
--consider the comma after pink. also, consider an em-dash, as “Pink, always pink—like the first time you saw me,”
there is no room here for breathing.
--this line is problematic, but consider, as a start, substituting “for a breath,” or “for breath,” for “for breathing.”
----from a proofing perspective, the major trouble with the last two lines in the first stanza, here, is that they want to be read as two independent clauses, but those clauses could be understood in one of two ways.
------The first would be, “[Something is p]ink, always pink, like the first time you saw me[.] / There is no room here for breathing.”
------The second would be, “[Something is p]ink, always pink[. L]ike [conditions were] the first time you saw me, / there is no room here for breathing.”
--------The inability to resolve these lines is not only a proofreader’s dilemna. It’s taxing on the reader. I want to understand what you mean, as discussed below, but am unable to extricate the meaning from the syntax.
I’ve dissected you.
A thousand tiny white bones. By morning, I’d renamed them all
--tense problems. Should this be, in effect, “I’ve dissected and, by morning, will have renamed”?
--fwiw, the only thing I can think of that would have a thousand tiny white bones, literally, is a snake, and I can't puzzle out what would have a thousand tiny white bones figuratively—a bunch of smurf skeletons? hmm . . .
and assembled them at the back of my throat
so I wouldn’t forget how you sound,
the glossy humming of bees.
--This construction reads, “So that I would not forget how the glossy humming of bees sounds.” Do you intend, “So that I would not forget that you sound like the glossy humming of bees”? If so, edit accordingly.
--boy, this stanza is damn close to describing a first-person ouroboros . . . It'd be soooo cool if you could fit that in there, too, but the trunk is pretty packed . . .
I’ve folded you open.
A museum of intricate disasters. All wound and shame
--intricate seems inapt next to disasters. It would work to provide poetic effect, but the image “museum of” saps its impact. This may not be, exactly, a proofread, but consider that the other images in the series are vision, autumn, thousand, brilliant and forgotten. “Museum” seems to frustrate the momentum of the other lines.
that you cleansed me of. A christening of hands,
and forgiveness that I can believe[out “,”]
--what you have here is either (1) an implied “that,” as in “and forgiveness that I can believe that in this heat I am something holy” or (2) two independent clauses joined by a comma [a comma splice] as in “forgiveness that I can believe. In this heat, I am something holy.
in this heat I am something holy.
I’ve taken your eyes.
Brilliant satellites. Burning without resistance,
orbiting above me, so I can dream
in a place where the shadows can’t reach,
the darkness no longer hypothesis.
--technically, you’d want “hypothetical.” “Hypothesis,” is awkward here. aConsider, “supposed.”
I’ve rendered you down.
Forgotten what I know about love. An articulation
--this is something of a proof. Here, “Forgotten what I know about love” doesn’t match. In the parallel fragments, the poem’s object, and not its narrator, is being described. Keep the mismatch if desired, but consider changing for consistency.
that has become foreign. I open my mouth to speak,
--“An articulation that has become foreign” is awkward because the predicate to “articulation” is a forgotten knowledge. It is strange for forgotten knowledge to become foreign.
a million drumming wings swarm,
--“swarm” is not something that wings do. You could call this metonomy, that the “wings” represent locusts the way boots represent soldiers, but in that case, “swarm” is largely redundant.
escaping from the catch in my throat.
--the narrative is disorderly here, causing flow problems. The image would be better served by “I open my mouth to speak and escaping from the catch in my throat a million drumming wings swarm.”
----Forgive my rather ham-fisted comments regarding the last stanza, above. I’ll be clearer here:
------Swarm and drum are interchangeable, as used above, and that’s problematic for several proofing reasons. To see why, compare “a million wings drumming from my throat swarm” with “a million wings swarming from my throat drum.” The second image seems to be the superior one, but given the position of the “a million drumming wings swarm,” it is difficult to resolve that image as the one that’s intendended. Sorry to push the point, but, quickly, this paraphrase should illustrate my point:
I throw,
a red ball flies,
flying.
--------Above, is the throw spinning the ball, or is a spinning ball being thrown? Returning to the original image, now, it seems that you want “I open my mouth, a million drumming wings escape from the catch in my throat, swarming.” Surely, that was overkill in the analysis, and I hope I haven’t completely obscured the point I’m making
Copyedit:
In sum, the punctuation is distracting. Make sense? On to bigger things. Specifically, the title.
The title.
You hate the title, and this is an attempt to help you see why. The title is:
“vision caused by an impending lover”
Quickly, this is a notion of hallucination. It’s backed up by all of the imagined and hallucinated activities in the body of the text. The story involves, in the title as otherwise, the narrator loosing her grip on reality because a potential romantic partner is getting too close. This is garden-variety relationship anxiety elevated to poetic heights, and effectively so.
The title matches the l2 fragments below it, and most precisely that of stanza 5, “Forgotten what I know about love.”
Now. You hate the title? You should. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s shy. Since you’ve disowned it, I feel OK taking some liberties with it and using it to make points. For convenience, here are the two lines as written, the title and S5l2:
“
vision caused by an impending lover” “Forgotten what I know about love.”
This is pure speculation, but I’m thinking you were scared to format the title after your l2s because it would look too bold. But bold is good!
To my eye, the title should clearly, clearly be printed,
“Vision caused by an impending lover.” “Forgotten what I know about love.”
And that feels right, doesn’t it? Suddenly, the poem has a backbone, and it runs all the way through. Also, with the title joining the rest of the poem, we’re treated to our first opportunity to ask, “Which lover? Is the predatory/wintery figure experiencing a vision, or is it the prey/summery character?” Of course, the answer should be, “both,” but that only becomes clear below.
Now, and again this is pure speculation, but I’m guessing you don’t like how the title lacks immediacy. Preliminarily, in my opinion, I think that the title and all the l2s should be edited into grammatical parallelism. And I like the title’s format. I won’t render it into a formula very well, but it’s something like “object + past participle + agent.” That formula could yield, for instance, “Tiny bones freed by cutting.” But, again, whatever direction you go, I think the poem would benefit from the paralellism.
That said, “Vision caused by an impending lover.” feels excessively circumspect. So, whichever direction you move, I’d think you’d favor stronger diction. That said, I’d keep the interplay between words of varied origins. To illustrate, take “Portent shown by an impressive clover.” That line could be improved, while retaining the interplay of words, as follows, “Portent blazed by dew-encumbered clover.” Now, that revision has problems of its own, but I trust you to take the gist.
Similar issues recur throughout, but I’ll leave them unnoted. In any case, don’t lose the excellent voicing you have in any effort to execute this note.
Onto the rest of the copy edit. Again, the notes above apply throughout, and I won’t repeat them, for mercy’s sake
I’ve become too narrow.
--edit to perpetuate the metaphor’s below, noting that width isn’t one of them.
--a possible save would set the poem up maybe, its themes and motifs. If the line were "I've become so narrow . . .", implying an unspoken "that" clause, the reader may validly supply "that I've lost sight of reality." The sense would be "I've become so narrow that the following poem is true for me." It would also yield a counter-interpretation regarding the narrowness of the vaginal canal, as in "In response to my fear of an impending lover, I have tried to make my body unavailable for sex." The first image would describe the hypnotic feeling called by certain therapists "fuzzy borders," which is the state of focusing on an object with attention that blurs the surrounding field. This is an attraction state, and it's invocation would feed the idea of willing love. The other state, that of clenching the sex organs, describes an antithetical state of repulsion. And, to completely overwork the idea, embodying both notions in the opening line services the split-mind nature of the poem.
----as repeated throughout, this comment is as much a real suggestion as it is an attempt to jog your intuitions about where this poem could be pushed. Here, the thought could be encapsulated in this way, "It's possible to begin this poem with a line that baits the reader into a realization that the poem is going to (a) require a close reading that resembles a mind reading, of sorts, and (b) introduce the reader to the well-specified dichotomy of desire and repulsion operating alongside one another."
Autumn still aches in my rib cage. Nowhere near dying,
--good use of cage, using "rib cage" instead of "ribs." It lets us know that there something is being held, kept, imprisoned, trapped, or some such thing.
--This line means the narrative is, at least in part, taking place in winter. This raises the question, and I’m not sure if it’s answered here, why is the ache “Nowhere near [to] dying”?
just the illusion of it as peonies bloom in my palm.
--does “just” mean “only,” as in, “The longing for autumn resists death, manifesting itself as peonies blooming in my palm”?
--NOTE: this is the first instance of a museum-like object. In keeping with that image, the peonies may be construed as a sculpture, and not merely as a metaphor for a blush or as a hallucinated/imagined image. The narrator may be holding an actual objet (so-spelled).
--NOTE: the peony is a symbol of healing, an its association with the narrator here makes her a medicinal figure.
--NOTE: peonies die back in autumn, giving further credence to the notion that the peony at issue here is not an actual flower.
Pink, always pink like the first time you saw me,
there is no room here for breathing.
--See the proofread comment, above, for a discussion of the issues with the grammar, here.
--This is both an idea of suffocation and of “having your breath taken away.” Excellently done. I hope that if the grammar issues are resolved, that duality will shine.
----Importantly, either the winter or summer voice could speak this line, adding to the richness of the poem. Specifically, it could be winter saying, “You were pink the first time you saw me, and now as then, you are rendered breathless,” or summer saying, “The first time you saw me, when the peonies were blooming, the experience was a breathless one.”
I’ve dissected you.
A thousand tiny white bones. By morning, I’d renamed them all
and assembled them at the back of my throat
--as noted above, a change from "at" to "from" would facilitate an ouroboros image, which syncs nicely as a symbol of death and rebirth.
so I wouldn’t forget how you sound,
the glossy humming of bees.
--This stanza is most likely hadean. The god of the underworld is talking about how the goddess of verdancy sounds like bees.
----However, the alternative reading is likewise valid, that the goddess is assembling and breathing life into a bag of bones.
--I’m having an issue with the idea of renaming the bones. What difference would that make? It seems to be a reference to Adam in Eden naming all of the animals as part of his stewardship, but I’m unable to make the connection into anything robust. Maybe I’m just missing something . . .
--In any case, this stanza excellently reflects every image and metaphor at play here. The paleontological (sure, it’s a word) assembly of bones reflects the museum image, the idea of morning plays against the notion of the passage of time and expands it from the moment-by-moment feeling conveyed above, and the entirety of the image is pleasantly trippy.
I’ve folded you open.
--Like a map or paper? That would be the reading best supported on the level of this stanza, but the map/paper image is an innovation of this stanza, and so I find myself resisting it.
--like a flower?
--who is "I've" and who is "you".
A museum of intricate disasters. All wound and shame
--Strangely, the actual naming of the museum here is awkward.
--The proposition of “you” being “all wound” references the peony and places us back with the summer voice.
that you cleansed me of. A christening of hands,
and forgiveness that I can believe,
--now, strangely, the narrator becomes ambiguous, again delightfully so, until finally, in the next line, Hades appears again to be speaking.
in this heat I am something holy.
--It is difficult to resolve which voice, the healthful or the dessicating, is enjoying the heat, which makes the holiness something of a mystery, too. Is this Persephone holding on to the last of her warmth and insisting on her holiness or Hades bathing in the warmth of his desired object, feeling sublime for the first time? It's either a demon feeling angelic or an angel feeling demonic (feeling/being). Wonderful stuff.
I’ve taken your eyes.
Brilliant satellites. Burning without resistance,
--Again, this could be voiced by either speaker
--NOTE: as above, my parsing this poem into two speakers is not necessitated by the poem, but the poem does seem to traverse a dualism, whether that dualism is embodied in two individuals or one.
orbiting above me, so I can dream
--NOTE: orbiting could reference orbital sockets, such that the eyes are not orbiting a gravitational focus, but rather are turning in place. The image is that of replacing one's own eyes with those of another.
in a place where the shadows can’t reach,
the darkness no longer hypothesis.
--These last two lines likely need work . . . Conceptually, the place where shadows can’t reach must be a light source, and so it’s unclear why the darkness is suddenly more than hypothetical.
----Consider “of a place”?
----Consider a semicolon after “reach”? (btw, I would hate that, but it would be a valid move haha)
------The sense I get is that an entity is moving from the world of life into the world of death, and that the world of death consists of light without shadow as well as darkness capable of opposing light, but that’s hard to sustain . . . In any case, the image seems to me to need a bit of sharpening. But that’s just my preference . . . Others may disagree.
--This stanza could also read as the preparation of a mummy, in keeping with the museum imagery and furthering the time-regression idea discussed in the opening way way way above
I’ve rendered you down.
--This is an idea of both “taking” the fat from an entity, which is a Hadean thought, as well as discerning the true nature of a person. It also makes me laugh realizing that it could validly mean “I’ve rendered [unto] you down,” as in “I’ve given you feathers to keep you warm.” That’s quite a nice dichotomy: on the one hand, the line could mean, “I’ve taken your warmth,” while on the other, it could mean, “I’ve given you warmth.” Cool. If you like that dichotomy as much as I do, consider adding birds, and not just bees, to the poem's rack of images.
Forgotten what I know about love. An articulation
--This is where it starts to go sideways . . . “Forgotten what I know about love” could mean “Forgotten everything I knew about love because of a force anti-thetical to love” or it could mean “Forgotten what I thought I knew about love” or “forgotten everything I know about love” and love could mean sex or passion or commitment or . . . I think the line “Forgotten what I know about love” just *is* too open. I think you have to specify it more.
that has become foreign. I open my mouth to speak,
--Likewise, “An articulation that has become foreign” could mean so many things. Plus, as noted in the proof, above, if the “articulation” references “everything I know,” the confusion doubles.
a million drumming wings swarm,
escaping from the catch in my throat.
--see the proof, above
--note that the amplification from a thousand tiny bones to a million wings is an amplification. This is relatively trivial in the poem as written, but if there were other estimations added—some, a handful, perhaps a dozen, a hundred—it would add meaning. If the numbers were to be sequential, growing hyperbolically larger, the suggestion of infinity would mean one thing. If the notion of infinity itself were introduced, the meaning would be something else entirely. Either works well with the concepts of death and love in the poem, and selecting an approach would be a matter of author's intent, which is a wonderful place to be during revision.
--I think once you get this stanza cracking and make some of the other edits I’ve suggested, this poem will really open itself up to you. Like I said, I think it’s great already, and with a little sharpening and honing, I think it could really become something to marvel at.
Is the thing that's been folded open a peony? Cause that would be awesome.
--Goodness, I failed to note that "Pink, always pink like the first time you saw me, / there is no room here for breathing." could be construed as the narrator's orgasm. That pairs nicely with the life/death motif and heightens elegantly the ideas of passion that pervade the poem.
Or, as a not-so-strong poet, I just might've missed the whole point of the poem.
like you've been shot (bang bang bang)
