A few months ago I wrote a poem called 'miss-placed affection''on a subject of great interest to me, but the poem itself was so unsatisfying that I started again from nearly the ground up. there are a couple lines reused. I would love some feedback on the effectiveness of this poem. thanks!
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This is all rather late being said,
I realise,
the endeavour is done, done and packed in cold storage.
I still have a key, tucked in a pocket
and some nights in the penumbra of sleep I imagine--
there is our tarpaulin, and there is our wool,
that high empty space, so bitterly cold--
those memories walk, waking
as real as a dream of a thing I have done,
with the smell sea-brine, mud-flat lingering,
repugnant, clean decay
and the white plaster windowsill with its desiccated frogs,
and I was barefoot and damp-kneed,
waiting for the water to boil.
We worked and we worked
a trembling, stumbling dogged urgency
a yawning, firm resolve
and the wet rip, slap, pulling felt from the net
Until my fingers dyed green and my knuckles chapped red,
pins and pins, and water and pins
pricking our fingers and cutting our thumbs,
and laying down white, so much white, so much snowy white
drowning and covered and cocooned
I relived white wool in my dreams,
and then a faint salve of blue, trailing in
soft rivers and curls, and deliberate, every fibre deliberate
until we could stand to see it no more,
ready to wrap it up, beat it down through its sopping, rolling
Metamorphosis.
The space that we made, the night that it rose,
an elephant’s wedding dress, an alien egg
broad sweeps of colour, so pale as the haze on the moon,
and I sat inside it,
just once, just one night,
but I failed to dully admire our soft, round room,
It stands diffuse
Unfixed in my mind.
I chose to instead be transfixed by the curl of your hair,
a sight nearly startling, nearly intimate,
you without your hat,
and I was so tired, sitting there by your feet,
with such a feeling of desperate tenderness
binding down my ribs.
In the summer I had an island,
my very own table to climb on, and sit
and the sunlight, goldenrod and saffron,
scraping against soft white rumples and hillocks
of the cloth spread across,
as though they were tiny evening water ripples,
and wind blowing in from the door, cool with a hint of salt,
to appease the absurd, muffling heat.
And just when I was sure of this place,
had walked it’s length and breadth,
found a way to be at peace with the spiders and the salamanders
living in the closet
we took it all down, sorted, packed flat and folded,
sweating and unsentimental,
efficient as a school teacher at the beginning of summer,
and shuddering, grime in every corner where I had not closely looked
and a dead bird, dry and limp
to be bundled out and disposed of, with no ceremony.
And then champagne and cookies, in the lackluster breeze off the bay,
you let me braid your hair with a ribbon,
talking of nothing like work, or the empty space that loomed ahead
hardly time to feel bereft.
And the evening petered away,
Far too warm to believe in frozen fingers,
The smell of wet sheep and silk and soap
just a figment.
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Reviews: 370
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