Our Lady The Opaque

[Erthona]

Quote Jacob

"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."

"I am not just being flowery"  Yet to me, flowery it seemed. This is legitimate critique. This seemed especially true with the title as it is. How am I the reader to know the significance of what that title means, or to do other than to take it at face value?

In terms of averted vision, I'm quite familiar with this from astronomy. I find it interesting in your quote for your argument that you leave off the first line "I will not look at you".
I find it difficult to justify claiming "averted vision", when at the outset the speaker says he will not look at the other person.

"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."

The use of punctuation has proven itself through many hundreds of years as a helper of clarity, so it is hardly accurate to say it "clutters up the page". The inverse is the truth; doing without punctuation clutters up up the clarity of the poem as is the case here. There are many people myself included in my younger years who had neither a strong foundation (read lazy) in grammar or punctuation and were more than happy to do away with  it. Other's were under the delusion it made the poem on the page look more like a poem. I find the idea here that these "extraneous marks clutter up a page", simply another attempt to appear unique when no such uniqueness exists. The bottom line (yes I know a cliche, but this isn't poetry), the practice of omitting punctuation should be consigned to the same realm as center justify and starting each line with a cap, that is the graveyard of affectations.  

Best,

dale

PS Your use of the word "plagiarize" is incorrect as you quote the source. Better to use the word borrow.