NICU, For Dominic Edit #2.1

[ellajam]

NICU, For Dominic

Your first breath holds ours frozen, after all Glitchy - I read it as an inversion at first. Maybe use semi-colons instead for the parenthetical phrase 'after all the weeks you grew inside your mother's womb' ?
the weeks you grew inside your mother's womb,
arriving early with an anxious bawl.
I count the possibilities of doom
and triumph on your toes, my abacus,
as monitors and regulators beep
and flash your vital signs. You mildly fuss
then slip back into artificial sleep;
your dreams a mystery of graphing flares. Checking in: I like this, it's a perfect description of the lit lines on a heart monitor graph, and other's dreams are always a mystery.
I trace fine lines on palms, your future: grand 'fine lines' is a bump for me, how about 'I trace lines on your palms, the future:' ?
achievements, escapades, sweet love affairs...does it have to be 'sweet' ?
your secret strengths read in each tiny hand. Gnarly meter here, the reader has to force it and it makes it jingly.
Although our place does not dictate our worth,
we cannot earn the luck or curse of birth.Something wrong here, it's a little forced. The sense is good, but it needs to pack more of a punch. Suggest tinkering with 'cannot' and "earn' and adding an adjective or two to make clear that it isn't being born itself that is the luck or curse, but the ensuing lifetime.

(I came across this today in our abandoned Crown of Sonnets. Coincidentally a healthy child celebrates his first birthday tomorrow, so I thought I'd honor the miracles of modern medicine by seeing if I can get this to stand alone. So far I've just tweaked the first line, the original can be found here:

Heroic Crown of Sonnets

Leah, thanks for the thorough read and excellent comments.
Yes, the first line needs a total rework. Thanks for the vote of confidence on the graphing flares line, you read it like I do but many have issues with it. I'll work on the "fine lines", I see your point. On "sweet", I would hope that his love affairs would at least leave a sweet aftertaste in his mouth but maybe it comes across as cliche. I'll fix the next line, metric wishful thinking. I'll keep your comments on the couplet in mind when I try to fix it.

Thanks again for your time and attention to this, much appreciated.

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I suggest that on the first four lines, you focus solely on how anxious or breathless you are about the baby, describing the whole toe count only when you get to line five. By lines five to eight, just keep up with the whole divining-your-future-with-your-toes-thing, but again, with the toe count being already described there, and with the awkward rhymes being completely scrapped. Then maybe you can elucidate more on the tenderness of the babe and the elusiveness of its fate on lines nine to twelve, using palmistry there as some sort of, er, framing device.  And at the final couplet, just switch the words up a bit so that the summary is more on the babe being nice, or having a weird fate, or, well, something, but I can't vomit out the right words.

I want to thank you again for this. On rereading it I realized that underneath the poem is the way when faced with uncertainty we sometimes turn to myth in desperation. That may turn into a more effective couplet. Your description of a possible reorganization of the poem will really help. Much appreciated.