isabelhershko
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Beneath a bloated sky,
sack heavy and pregnant with rain,
the olive branches bend
to the rhythm of shower songs.
Somewhere, you are drowning.
In nicotine, in thread.
In everything but dew.
The floodwaters ignore you.
Slip their fingers into different homes,
give away your chorus.
Knuckles brined like forgotten soil,
an upwards caress to the hollow desert.
Scoop the tears and sow the collection.
Desperation is a rusted boat,
nickeled red.
I can feel the begging in your bones,
the tornadoes in your knees.
Your tongue plaque white and
every word is like a cave.
He is the adage, sick with salt.
Water, water everywhere.
Nor any drop to drink.
The clouds give birth,
a sun red brilliance of Patrón and veins.
The doctor clocks out and
you are the night nurse.
Posts: 1,279
Threads: 187
Joined: Dec 2016
ok, so first, let me say that I loved a ton of this. You have spent some time and paid your dues, I think, to have such a natural affinity for sonics. There is quite a bit of cleverness as well and a refreshing dash of originality.
(09-05-2015, 07:09 AM)isabelhershko Wrote: Beneath a bloated sky,
sack heavy and pregnant with rain,
the olive branches bend
to the rhythm of shower songs.
it should be "sack-heavy"
the world of poetry (well, accomplished poetry anyway) has been steadily moving away from overly poetic descriptions of nature and more toward /presentations/ of nature. Readers have grown a little tired of poets over describing simple events just to show off their poetic skills and I believe you may be crossing the line a bit here in the first 2 lines. Lines 3 and 4 are the perfect balance of imagery and simple presentation coupled with a refreshing concept.
So far - summary - it is raining causing olive branches to bend.
Quote:
Somewhere, you are drowning.
In nicotine, in thread.
In everything but dew.
The floodwaters ignore you.
Slip their fingers into different homes,
give away your chorus.
these 2 stanzas are quite interesting. The introduction of address occurs here though it is not clarified. drowning is a great play off strophe 1. The last line is both superfluous and does not live up to the promise of the setup. First, after hearing that the addressee is drowning in nicotine and thread there would be no natural assumption of literal drowning. Second, "dew" seems the wrong choice anyway as there is no support for it elsewhere.
"The flood waters ignore you" is a great concept. Simply stated, connected and powerful. The tie back with "chorus" is fine. "Give away" is a bit weak.
summary - it is tough to accurately parse what is going on here, but it seems to me that the addressee is "drowning" in personal issues and therefore oblivious to the beautiful carnage that is surrounding them.
Quote:
Knuckles brined like forgotten soil,
an upwards caress to the hollow desert.
Scoop the tears and sow the collection.
Once again, your sonics are spot on, your diction is interesting and your line breaks are solid throughout.
I wonder if you meant knuckles brined /with/ forgotten soil.
"upwards caress" isn't really working for me, I think you need a different noun.
"the collection" is completely lost on me. At this point, it throws me completely out of the poem, even after several reads. Perhaps I am simply dense, tired or slightly inebriated but I think you have quite a bit of room for clarity here.
Quote:
Desperation is a rusted boat,
nickeled red.
it is unfortunate you have chosen to sink into abstraction with "desperation" as I love the phrase "rusted boat, nickeled red". The unfortunate comparison is quite disappointing.
Quote:
I can feel the begging in your bones,
the tornadoes in your knees.
Your tongue plaque white and
every word is like a cave.
once again, I think it would be improved to use "plaque-white". With the obviously skillful demonstration of florid language here, I am reminded that the "desperation" ploy was superfluous as this conveys desperation so much better than the overt declaration. I am a little stuck on "every word is like a cave". The expression is original and great, but caves have so many properties - is our absentee addressee hiding in their words? Are the deep and dark? I feel like I might be on the right track but it feels important to know for sure.
Quote:
He is the adage, sick with salt.
Water, water everywhere.
Nor any drop to drink.
on a personal note, I hate the sudden centering of the 'adage' but maybe others will love it. "sick with salt" is great. you have now introduced a third character in our play and it is s little light on character development. Who is he? A lost lover? A rapscallion? There is not enough poem left to develop this concept to my satisfaction so I feel like I have been unfairly introduced in the foyer as the hostess rushed off to tend to the burning biscuits.
Quote:
The clouds give birth,
a sun red brilliance of Patrón and veins.
The doctor clocks out and
you are the night nurse.
It turns out I was the night nurse after all. Shame as my identity doesn't gel real well with the rest of the poem. Could "he" be the doctor? I don't think so but I can't figure it out. The narrator must be a patient - probably a hospital patient in ICU as night nurses don't generally appear in the regular wards or in hospice.
Did you know:
The night nurse is a recurring figure in Marvel comics that tends to superheroes to keep the anonymous?
The night nurse was a movie (1931)
Anyway, overall, this is a poem that feels like it has much more poetic skill than direction - almost like a wordsmith showing off but lacking a complete vision.
Thanks for posting
Good luck.
Posts: 1,139
Threads: 466
Joined: Nov 2013
(09-05-2015, 07:09 AM)isabelhershko Wrote: Beneath a bloated sky,
sack heavy and pregnant with rain, Sack heavy and pregnant with rain. Hum -- the uterus is a sack? And the babies are bloat? "Bloated" things make me think more of fat men, or children with Ascaris, than of, well, babies.
the olive branches bend
to the rhythm of shower songs. The olive branches dance. I guess olive branches is a Biblical allusion -- what about the dancing? Especially with the following line, I would think a stronger image would be better here, rather than some little play of glockenspiels.
Somewhere, you are drowning. Comma, not period.
In nicotine, in thread. Comma, not period.
In everything but dew. So somewhere, I (for convenience's sake; I'm sure I'm not the one the speaker's really talking to) am washing away my things in some drug-related vice rather than the waters. Where does the thread come in? On the last line: it reinforces the contrast between the rainstorm and the hill of vice (or the ark of vice) rather well, but "dew" would be more effective if, again, "the rhythm of shower songs" was something more violent.
The floodwaters ignore you. Comma, not period. Why the obsession with fragmenting your sentences? That's what the line is for.
Slip their fingers into different homes, I feel like an "as they" is missing here, if only for the reinforcement of that contrast -- different line, sure, but should be the same sentence, and so.
give away your chorus. Chorus? Like the earlier, I don't get this. Chorus as in refrain? No, that's silly. Chorus as in the bunch of people surrounding you who comment on your state? That could work -- I am in the ark, and the others are not, for the others thought I was silly, with that ark -- but it feels like an association that just came out of nowhere.
Knuckles brined like forgotten soil, You definitely meant with. Those knuckles being still the floodwaters isn't so clear here; I suggest you connect this stanza to the above as an extension of the sentence.
an upwards caress to the hollow desert. "to"? So the desert is higher than everywhere else -- or is the high place where I play a desert, though that feels just as much of a stretch. I do agree that "upwards caress" sounds off, too.
Scoop the tears and sow the collection. Hum -- eh? Who scoops the tears -- what tears does he or she scoop? And what the heck is this "collection"? Is this the folks of the ark so propagating -- though at this point, even with the debauchery, babes are not allowed to be made, and the waters have yet to descend.
Desperation is a rusted boat, So my floating aquarium of tobacco is a boat that's sinking? Alright. This, of course, only makes the "upwards caress" line more unnecessary (or at least more uneven -- if you wanted to say that the rain falls in some hollow desert, you should have shown so earlier).
nickeled red. Coated with nickel red? Chemically, that makes no sense, and visually, at least if you know what nickelling really is, it makes only slightly less sense than the early -- however good this sounds, change this.
I can feel the begging in your bones,
the tornadoes in your knees. Colon or comma. Leaving the next fragment hanging is rather annoying.
Your tongue plaque white and
every word is like a cave. At this point, I'm starting to feel like I'm just elaborating on milo's points above. Caves are complex things: that simile is too ambiguous to be effective. This does convey desperation much better than the earlier, sure, but I think the earlier stanza is important because it reinforces the metaphor of the deluge, and it begins the image of red -- perhaps you could move it to after this stanza? And so:
"[b]"I can feel the begging in your bones,[/b]
the tornadoes in your knees: Quick note: I would think that instead of tornadoes, which feels sort of like a throwaway image, howabout vortices, just so the storm could be more present? The begging in the bones needn't be changed though, since I guess aching bones means coming storms.
[b]desperation, a rusted boat,[/b]
[b]nickeled red.[/b]
[b]And your tongue is plaque white,[/b]
[b]your words dark caves.[/b]
He is the adage, sick with salt. Oh, you mean me? That is, why the sudden shift of voices? Or do you mean the floodwaters -- I suppose it is the flood's knuckles that are so brined -- but then, what the heck?
Water, water everywhere. Comma!
Nor any drop to drink. Nor? What's the disjunction? "yet not a drop to drink."
The clouds give birth,
a sun red brilliance of Patrón and veins. Oh, so the baby was the sun -- and the red of the sun is the sinking of the boat. That's a twist, I guess -- I thought of the rain first -- but the "bloated" part is still unnecessary. Now, the connection: the red of the sun, Patron the whisky, a rusted boat -- my connection is that it's alcohol that killed the me. But that's my connection, and I'm betting that's far off from what you wanted --- or if not, I'm betting few others would spend so much time and memory power trying to figure that out. Poetry being a form of communication, that last point means this poem's a bit of a failure, methinks.
The doctor clocks out and
you are the night nurse. And I am the nurse helping the preggers mother out before the doctor comes in -- alright. That's...weird, really, because where the hell (who the hell) is this doctor, and how is me being the sky's nurse related to me drowning in nicotine? My indulging my vices is what made me such a nurse -- but then, how? And that one idea is already the idea of what's essentially separating from the real drowning, the "floodwaters" -- either I'm missing something, or you wrote this with way more in mind. On the first, well, I'd want an explanation, of course, but preferably not from you, dear writer: if more than I managed to find anything from this, then that's a good sign. On the second, well, of course I'd want an explanation too, but I would consider that more a failure on your part than a success, if only because this isn't no Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock -- at least to me, this isn't nearly long enough to be so dense. Finally, as a whole, though the words are a good draw, the actual packaging of metaphors and ideas is very rough, very inelegant: already a big negative, however well the ideas behind them are, in conception or structuring.
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