The dogs were snapping bones out of my hand and
darling there are so many things we say that we don’t
understand even after we’ve carved out the syllables
on our tongues. What we do in the dark has no hands,
said a poet whose name I cannot recall but whose
taste lingers in my mouth. I think I agree. My
hands are too small and I can make my knuckles
crack at will and so I do, and I collect flinches like
others collect stamps. I made you wince. I was here and
this is proof. You can’t rely on just pain, no matter how
familiar the curl of it between the cartilage and the
creaking hinges of time like a promise of old age and arthritis.
The dogs were snapping bones straight out of my hand and
the eldest is growing blind but walks still with his strange and
high gait, like a prince courting the dust, like a prophet. And
I love him the way autumn loves its fallen leaves, the way
you love someone or something that will not be with you
always, the way I love strangers with beautiful wrists glimpsed
under dim arches on rainy nights or dead birds on the street.
Once in my childhood I went to see eagles, their golden
eyes and their jagged feet and how they would flutter
before coming to rest on the line drawn to an extended
fist and I don’t know you but I would like to tell
you what another poet said, to someone else—
I wanted your eyes, like the shadows of two
small birds, to change. This is what time is.
Listen, I don’t think I’m capable of love, not
in the way the movies and the books and all the poems
talk about, and I’m still fine, but I think I should put a warning,
Speaks of love but really wants to talk about the
tenderness of tendons wound around bones and the
sweet machinery of words stitched piece by piece into a
patchwork of sadness and hope. My father is growing
a garden in front of the new house and the fence is
dirty and white and the ants crawled up my legs. There’s
a dead frog sitting in a corner of the bedroom staring up at
me and waiting and I want to tell it I don’t know why
this sort of thing happens, either. With the lights off I
can hear the sound of cockroach feet on the tiles and
come morning it’s a surprise I’m still alive, and as I step
out the light washes over me like a hawk while my sweet
old dog steals the bones from my hand, the words from my mouth.
____
Lines borrowed from Marty McConnell and Anne Sexton respectively.
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139,664 Literary Works • 672,645 Reviews
Unraveling.
Your language and structure reveals a character who's unraveling, falling apart, the sentences keep on coming once the mouth opens. You constantly snap back to the dogs for reference as if in spilling out everything that's said you need to find your way back to a point from which to continue again. I like it, although with a poem like it I think you run that risk of losing your flow or the tightness in which your images lie, or perhaps even just the cohesiveness of the whole thing:
"the way I love strangers with beautiful wrists glimpsed
under dim arches on rainy nights or dead birds on the street."
the confusion I get from this stems from the wording - the dead birds seems out of place, what is it following on from? Strangers...glimpsed under...dead birds on the street (which makes no sense) or "the way I love...dead birds on the street" (which makes more sense)?
The glimpses of your life, though they have some great imagery, seem disconnected. It's like you've got the sentiment there, the self-reflective tone that resides in both the bits about 'you' and the bits about 'I', but there's not much else putting them together. The eagle landing and poem reference, the whole thing about the new garden and ants. In fact it's almost like in the last few stanzas you just kind of went somewhere else completely. It's founded in a more concrete happening (waking up the next morning) but bar the dogs it's unrelated to what the rest of the poem was setting up, this confessional monologue about 'you' and 'I'.
As a little personal nitpick, I don't know about 'the words from my mouth'. It seems like an obvious summation of what the dogs were a metaphor for, which I think readers would pick up anyway from the frequent images of speechlessness. Don't throw the meaning out there, I think you'd do well without that last bit of fat.
Overall uh, great poem, great images, quite consistent but lacking a teeny bit in overall structure and how everything's put together. You're moving in and out of things a bit too fast and while I think for an unraveling rambling thing like this it might work, it's detrimental to the cohesiveness in some areas.
Well. I read this and I think I'm going to read it again. It's a snowball effect, isn't it? It just rolls and rolls and rolls and collects imagery and feeling like a snowball being rolled into a snowman. Some of the sentences that you use strike so close to what I understand that I'm left baffled and confused. Don't get me wrong--that's superb!
Yes, the format bugged me at first, but when I kept reading I realized the effect it had on the poem to end your lines like that. It rolled it up faster and faster until I couldn't stop reading it. There is a distinct flow to this poem, and I wouldn't change it no matter what anyone says.
That being said--the part about your father growing a garden seems terribly out of place. Like a random switch in what the poem is about. It's amended in the next sentence with the lines about the dead frog, but that entire sentence about the ants and your father and his fence seem... really out of place.
And... that's really the only critique I have for you. Lovely lovely lovely imagery.
Hey there.
I read your piece, and quite liked it. It has some serious sensory language, and some good content. However I did find the way you ended your lines a bit odd. I don't know if that was done on purpose, but it doesn't look right. It's not bad, I got the message, but it confuses me a fair bit.
Also, right in the middle of the poem, is the largest run on sentence I've ever seen. You can chop that up fine. But, normally, my reviews don't focus on grammar, so let's get to the poem.
I'm not quite sure what the dog symbolyzes, nor at this point wether the narrator is human or not. If it's an erie feel you've gone for, you've hit it, but with the same arrow you've pierced a layer of confusion that, well, confuses me. Also, you tend to use the word 'and' alot. You should never overuse a word in a poem, unless it's a scary poem. In a scary poem, it's okay to repeat the one thing you don't want your reader to forget, over and over. Other than that, I liked your piece's message.
7 out of 10.
Methrirr123