December 08, 2007
Sarah: Poetry
I love the first stanza especially.
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
by Adrienne Rich
My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.
They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.
I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control.
A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths.
A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.
To do something very common, in my own way.
Posted by sarah at December 08, 2007 11:30 PMI was brutally savaged by grammar once. Generally, I'm a live-and-let live type, but for my own protection I now keep a fifteen year old's LiveJournal with me at all times to distract grammar while I run screaming in the other direction.
Posted by: Spin on December 8, 2007 11:01 AM