I've been trying to write more personal narratives and I'm so ready to run away from it. I feel like the ant and the kid that burns ants with a magnifying glass. I don't know whether this new approach to writing is terrible or even worth pursuing. I kind of hope it's not, because it's hard. Then again, that might be the only reason this is worth pursuing. P.S. This is written in couplets, though some of the lines are too long and fold over in this post.
Lake House
One time when your face hid against my belly you made me
think me of childhood. You said, That’s not something I want you
to associate with our sex. But I thought, When you touch me,
don’t you touch it all at once?—
the schoolyard girl that doesn’t know to cry when pushed
down on the gravel at recess. The ripe youth that opens
like a laugh, a spreading skirt (startle of the apple’s white skin
as a blade undresses crimson). Even the wife, the mother with child
pulsing against the breast—and, if I make it, the slow rot of old age.
No, you probably are not the banks or the silt or the reeds,
but suddenly I think I am the river.
And in this dream I want to know how water can look at itself
without drying up. Sometimes, by becoming an ocean or a lake.
But let me tell you something about water with no place to go:
it makes the same motion I do, pacing across floorboards in an empty house.
You have your travel and I have mine.
At the end of this, perhaps you will have found
something and I will have lost. Or maybe
I will gain your fingerprints under my skin, pile them up
in a heap that doesn’t sink or burn—all your traces trapping
me like a net thrown into water that no one remembered
to pull back in.
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+ Pretty sure this is probably a typo but ... l1-2 you made me/think me of
ReplyDelete+ I think it is very fitting and true that when you touch someone else, or form a bond with someone else, you are in fact forming a bond with not just the person as they are now, but everything they ever have been since their whole life is simply just steps that build towards the present. That may or may not have been a run-on sentence.
+ "a spreading skirt (startle of the apple’s white skin/as a blade undresses crimson" uhhh I risk sounding like one of those people in poetry classes that reads too far into something and then everyone looks at that person and thinks "wtf you don't know anything about poetry or anything" but I'm reading this as the act of cutting oneself
+ How *can* water look at itself?
+ This poem has a lot going on in it--there are a few relationships mentioned in it: Mother and child, speaker with "you" (though I think there are a few yous in this), speaker with herself.
+ The beginning of the poem moves from a speaker with their lover, then to the speaker's childhood, then to the speaker's mother. There is also a different you by the end of the poem. The speaker is trying to come to grips with the loss or destruction of relationships that leave the speaker feeling lost.