Milkcow
Woman, there is a steel windmill in your eye, as you cross the hills of me-
and a copper bell shucks mud against your coarse white neck.
Your heft
is the promise of a blanket—
Something heavy, something warm.
But I still shiver and the gash in me grows
larger and full of lush grass. The ground has loosened and
I’ve turned tendons into roots, my heart into a
beating, bulbous white onion, which sits cool and weighted
inside of my ribs. Come,
I am waiting for you to turn me into cud.
Oh, sweet thing. Brave thing. Thing that will be sucked.
Beast of my love, I am sorry, I could never be
full, or enough.
Laura Strain
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3 comments:
Laura! Excellent to hear (and read) from you. Your work looks to be growing in good ways. Still a fan of those Faulknerian words, I see. Milkcow works rather well, I think.
Dann
Laura. This is beautiful. Does the poem begin with "woman" or is it to be read "milkcow woman?"
A few things: I think certain words trip up the flow, namely "steel" in the first stanza. Its hardness seems to grate against windmill, which is such a soft word. Also, I personally think it reads better without "lush" and "of" in the first and second to last lines of the third stanza.
I really love this poem. The last two lines are especially beautiful to me, very James Wright-esque, though I'm not sure how I feel about "thing that will be sucked." It seems like there are one too many sentences in that last stanza and I believe the other lines are stronger.
Anyways I am jealous.
I agree, "steel" and "lush" can go. While not redundant, per se, "steel windmill" feels overdetermined (a far worse example would be something like, "soggy rain"). I think the problem in this is that "steel" describes what the windmill is, not so much how it looks, and yet, we know it's a windmill all the same. "Lush" just strikes me as too overtly poetic.
I think the long lines work rather well in stanza one, which makes me concerned that "me-" may be too scant in lineation.
A few of the issues I have with the poem seem concurrent with one another: the ornate moments all distract. Rhythmically, "a copper bell shucks mud against your neck" is fantastic, and it unfolds three images, without granting the neck superiority. The cow sort of blooms, this way, as an image.
I have the same issue with "beating, bulbous." The image of the white onion-heart is great, but we know that hearts beat, we know that onions are bulbous (perhaps less so...).
Where the poem lacks dressing, I find myself most bowled over. "Come" and "cud" have a really eerie echo, brought to an even higher level of resonance by the (I contend) erotic quality of the line's "waiting." "Beast of my love" is one of those uncanny pairings of often overwrought words (beast, love) that is somehow not overwrought at all. You've got yourself a good one there, I think.
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