05-30-2024, 03:53 PM
# crimson bank
Milk & Honey
I shudder at the thought of him,
hungry for the fat of the land
but only served a bowl of dust.
I recall him under thin shade, fumbling
after periscope snakes in the creek.
A snake bit him, he shrieked like a child,
only receiving a pinhole wound;
unlike the gaping crater
that formed his vacant world.
I blamed the well he sprang from, in vain.
The well had since dried to a husk, like the
brittle chaff that sprinkled through his fingertips.
I should have never let him out of my sight.
We lost it all when he couldn’t let go,
his vise-like grip latched on supple velvet.
Before the end, I recall his crooked smile,
succoring my tattered soul, cool as the
coffee-tinted madrone trunk.
I still hear his ragged weeping, dumbfounded
as a newborn colt in a world of bright hues;
wet from the womb and bound for the slaughter.
——————
You have three images: the snake, the madrone, and the infant calf. This is a snake eating its own
tail swallowing a newborn calf and there’s an idiot chasing the snake around and
*I feel like the idiot.*
No one knows what a madrone is. It’s a weird tree. Most frequently, it’s planted as the strawberry fruit tree. It yields bitter honey and fruit so high in sugar that it ferments to alcohol in the wild and gets animals, like bears, drunk: see the flag of the city of Madrid.
I know that because I like weird plants. When you use the word “madrone” in a poem, you’re forcing other people to go look up a weird plant.
Fine. But there’s no payoff.
You can use that as your central image and educate your reader, or else don’t use the word madrone.
You also have a periscopic snake. You can talk about serperines or other nontoxic nonthreatening snakes that have a loch-ness profile and educate your audience about how they’re benign.
You can talk about velvet and how it naturally occurs on the horns of young animals and how anacondas wait behind calving does to eat their infants.
What you can’t do is throw all that scientific arcanum at us alongside “bowl of dust”.
I like the image of a man getting bit by a harmless snake, or a snake swallowing a velvet-horned infant, of a lizard ingesting its shed skin—it’s neato.
But you seem to be mistaking obscurity for interestingness. The interesting part is the man. Bother me about him, not the weedy scientific trivia.
What makes you shudder at the thought of him?
This poem will become fifteen or twenty poems. Pick one story, tell it.
Focus on the intense part. Find words you enjoy. Kill all the to-be verbs. See if you can’t occupy a dualism by, say, using soft words to describe something brutal.
But you can only tell one story at a time.
And for you, and not anyone else, just for you: avoid Latinate verbs. They’re a huge source of drag here. Go Germanic or go home.
Milk & Honey
I shudder at the thought of him,
hungry for the fat of the land
but only served a bowl of dust.
I recall him under thin shade, fumbling
after periscope snakes in the creek.
A snake bit him, he shrieked like a child,
only receiving a pinhole wound;
unlike the gaping crater
that formed his vacant world.
I blamed the well he sprang from, in vain.
The well had since dried to a husk, like the
brittle chaff that sprinkled through his fingertips.
I should have never let him out of my sight.
We lost it all when he couldn’t let go,
his vise-like grip latched on supple velvet.
Before the end, I recall his crooked smile,
succoring my tattered soul, cool as the
coffee-tinted madrone trunk.
I still hear his ragged weeping, dumbfounded
as a newborn colt in a world of bright hues;
wet from the womb and bound for the slaughter.
——————
You have three images: the snake, the madrone, and the infant calf. This is a snake eating its own
tail swallowing a newborn calf and there’s an idiot chasing the snake around and
*I feel like the idiot.*
No one knows what a madrone is. It’s a weird tree. Most frequently, it’s planted as the strawberry fruit tree. It yields bitter honey and fruit so high in sugar that it ferments to alcohol in the wild and gets animals, like bears, drunk: see the flag of the city of Madrid.
I know that because I like weird plants. When you use the word “madrone” in a poem, you’re forcing other people to go look up a weird plant.
Fine. But there’s no payoff.
You can use that as your central image and educate your reader, or else don’t use the word madrone.
You also have a periscopic snake. You can talk about serperines or other nontoxic nonthreatening snakes that have a loch-ness profile and educate your audience about how they’re benign.
You can talk about velvet and how it naturally occurs on the horns of young animals and how anacondas wait behind calving does to eat their infants.
What you can’t do is throw all that scientific arcanum at us alongside “bowl of dust”.
I like the image of a man getting bit by a harmless snake, or a snake swallowing a velvet-horned infant, of a lizard ingesting its shed skin—it’s neato.
But you seem to be mistaking obscurity for interestingness. The interesting part is the man. Bother me about him, not the weedy scientific trivia.
What makes you shudder at the thought of him?
This poem will become fifteen or twenty poems. Pick one story, tell it.
Focus on the intense part. Find words you enjoy. Kill all the to-be verbs. See if you can’t occupy a dualism by, say, using soft words to describe something brutal.
But you can only tell one story at a time.
And for you, and not anyone else, just for you: avoid Latinate verbs. They’re a huge source of drag here. Go Germanic or go home.
A yak is normal.