after the flood (edited)

[cjchaffin]

after the flood

There was nowhere
left for her to turn,
right after the rains
came and washed him away.
 
So she lay down
upon the softened meadow,
lost in a stream
of consciousness.
 
She tucked herself in
between the sheets of Ulysses
and dreamt with both eyes open,
munching lotus fruit and flowers
as the river widened its mouth.

Most of this is actually /quite/ good.  I think the linebreak on L1 would be better on "left" which would give us the nice individual concept of everything being washed away with the flood and of course the enjambed reality -

There was nowhere left
for her to turn


"right" could be trimmed. you might not need "came and" either.

Originally I liked the break on "stream" (of course I am a sucker for double meaning enjambment) but after a while it started bothering me as too overt, if you will as "of consciousness" doesn't really support a whole line.

You use the same trick on "in" to begin S3 which leaves you with the problematic choice - of course the whole reads stronger without "in" and to break on a weak preposition is almost always bad but to lose it you would also lose the nice double meaning which this time accompanies a nice image. - oh, the agony of choices.

The final Strophe is the strongest in both imagery and metaphor.  The allusion to Ulysses is interesting and hammers it properly into place as joyce's deliberate refuge as opposed to Homers island or, possibly, Tennyson's:

http://www.online-literature.com/tennyson/722/

As a whole, I get a poem about a woman who has lost her man so she succumbs to the desire to /lose/ herself or forget herself by choice.  my assumption originally was that the river was grief but it could also be a literal suicide. It is the "stream of consciousness" that indicates to me that this is a virtual stream.  After the flood could reference a literal flood, a flood of grief, a flood of tears or a biblical flood.  i like the combination of elements we receive here.

Over all, one of the best poems i have read here in quite some time.  Thank you for the read.

thanks for the keen eye. milo. i'm terrible with line breaks and enjambment, but experimenting with it and getting good feedback is the only way for me to learn from my mistakes, i suppose. i like your suggestions, they make sense.

and you're right about the virtual stream. i hadn't even considered the fact that readers might think it literal until i posted it. but i can see how at first that that might be the assumption. i always like a little mystery in my poems, but not so much so that readers get completely lost and/or don't connect with it because the references are too vague or obscure.

i'm grateful for the careful read. i'll post an edit soon. thank you so much.