A Short Poem Written Outside During a Storm That Took Place Shortly After a Death
#6
(05-26-2017, 04:44 AM)rowens Wrote:  There's something more in the weather / when the woman you love dies, / her perfume may not be on the wind, / but her mind is in the clouds / and her piss is in the rain.
the comma between "lines" two and three feels confused: on the one hand, it advocates separation of the two, on the other hand it forces the reader to read the two as part of a whole. and since the entire poem is a run-on sentence, this forces the reader to choose between one of two breaks: the first one splits the first "line" from the rest, the second one splits the first two and the last four from each other. 
as such, there is developed a double-meaning: on the one hand, it could be a wholehearted rejection of the romantic as a mode of thinking, as proposed by the first division method, and on the other, it could be more specific to the death of "the woman you love". i think the rest of the poem better supports this second meaning, since the next lines, at least for me, deal rather specifically with death, or the obliteration of identity associated with it. "her mind is in the clouds" is very, very close to the idiom "head [is] in the clouds", only using a slightly more visceral, or perhaps more essential, term; either way, it speaks of her not just as having gone to heaven but, more importantly, of her being all distracted by fantasy. whereas "piss in the rain", although understood on my first reading as being in direct support of this obliteration of romance, eventually read for me as something more sexual, especially because it was so separated from "her perfume may not be on the wind", such that the obliteration of romance corresponds to the obliteration of the woman's identity in death, or rather of the woman's identity because of romance.
thus, my suggestion: perhaps clarify the punctuation, divide the poem into its two constituent sentences. since both meanings are very close to each other, i find that eliminating one enhances the other. of course, whether or not this is followed, i think this is a wonderful piece. thanks for the read.
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RE: A Short Poem Written Outside During a Storm That Took Place Shortly After a Death - by RiverNotch - 06-03-2017, 06:59 PM



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