12-23-2015, 02:53 PM
Re:all regarding the title - For some years I have been entitling many of my love(ish) poems "Our Lady of/the _____." It started when I was attending a catholic university and reading a lot of medieval lit. You can pretend it's a reference to Our Lady of the Flowers if it will make you feel better.
Billy - Thanks for your thoughts. The "Therein" is meant holistically, but I get the confusion. I'm curious if this is the general impression, was this a side note for you or did it really seem like that was what was meant? The "venom in my hand / spines on my tongue" is talking about violence, but not necessarily the physical sort.
Dale - I am not just being flowery. You can go ahead and assume that nothing I post here is me just being flowery. If you are legitimately curious about the meaning of this poem I am happy to explain it, but I was under the impression this was a workshopping forum and not the "Jacob's mushy feelings hour." The "what" of holding in the blurred periphery is the object of the previous line (eyes, face, hands). I feel this is fairly obvious. Those lines in the first stanza have nothing to do with absence making the heart grow fonder, they are a reference to the optical effect wherein bright objects appear brighter when not looked at directly, as I more or less explain the narrator is doing. My justifiable reason for parting ways with the general laws of grammar, here meaning punctuation (since apart from that it's fine), is my belief, plagiarized from Cormac McCarthy, that extraneous marks clutter up a page. In simple pieces like this I enjoy doing without them entirely. If the punctuation was added the stanza would look like this,
I will not look at you:
your eyes and your face and your hands,
I hold them in the blurred periphery;
like the sun and the stars
you grow brighter when I look away.
Billy - Thanks for your thoughts. The "Therein" is meant holistically, but I get the confusion. I'm curious if this is the general impression, was this a side note for you or did it really seem like that was what was meant? The "venom in my hand / spines on my tongue" is talking about violence, but not necessarily the physical sort.
Dale - I am not just being flowery. You can go ahead and assume that nothing I post here is me just being flowery. If you are legitimately curious about the meaning of this poem I am happy to explain it, but I was under the impression this was a workshopping forum and not the "Jacob's mushy feelings hour." The "what" of holding in the blurred periphery is the object of the previous line (eyes, face, hands). I feel this is fairly obvious. Those lines in the first stanza have nothing to do with absence making the heart grow fonder, they are a reference to the optical effect wherein bright objects appear brighter when not looked at directly, as I more or less explain the narrator is doing. My justifiable reason for parting ways with the general laws of grammar, here meaning punctuation (since apart from that it's fine), is my belief, plagiarized from Cormac McCarthy, that extraneous marks clutter up a page. In simple pieces like this I enjoy doing without them entirely. If the punctuation was added the stanza would look like this,
I will not look at you:
your eyes and your face and your hands,
I hold them in the blurred periphery;
like the sun and the stars
you grow brighter when I look away.