Pick a peck of me. Pack me in salt.
Caper, okra, and artichoke. Throw in
the sun with the pickled egg yolks.
Stave off the freeze and the cyclic little deaths
With slow swigs of long light
and sweet body, sweat body, bare body jam.
Seal me in a mason jar and I will be
your ugly buzzing orchestra, your broken night
light, a saved-up firefly that lasts.
2 comments:
I am enamored of this poem. I've been staring at it for a while trying to articulate or maybe even discern why that is, and I think I may have gotten somewhere.
First the visceral stuff. The poem is a sonic onslaught. But no, onslaught is the wrong word. It's a sonic feast, a smorgasbord even. Listen to how "Summer" chimes off "cellar," how "pick," "peck," "pack" crackle before reverberating back into the established sibilance with "salt." What I love is that this is not just a flare-up moment of sonic bombast. The poem continues to pop and crackle and slither around on the tongue: "caper, okra, artichoke," "pickled egg yokes" (you mean yolks, yes?), "the cyclic little deaths / with slow swigs of long light / and sweat body, sweet body, bare body jam." Phew. This is a feat of sonic concision and not just a smattering of sounds in lines, or, to pun, sound for sound's sake.
Then there is the address. I dare say it's almost threatening in its imperative insistence. However, the swagger and insistence of the voice, coupled with the poem's overwhelming sound, creates a kind of hybrid effect. I am tempted to call this sexy, or fierce, or coquettish, or maybe even cruel, but I don't know that any of those words bear fruit.
The two above-mentioned elements are so sweeping one almost has trouble reconciling places the poem needs work. Alas, here are a few:
-What are those "cyclic little deaths"? They seem to relate to fermentation or the process of preservation, but the image seems not to reach its full fruition.
-I have trouble with "sweat body" as a kind of jam. I'm taken with the others, but have trouble parsing that bad boy. I don't know that I find that altogether damning though.
At first I was at odds with the title, but the more I consider it the more it seems perfectly inappropriate. The poem bounds and gallops and saunters and performs all sorts of upbeat maneuvers, but then there is this overhanging title to remind us that there is the music of Death at hand. I find that jarring in a positive way.
Hats off on this effort.
So, we touched upon this a lot during the meeting, but I have a few more things to say. Like Dann, I'm having trouble with "sweat body." Mainly in that I think, by taking it out, you clean up the rhythm a little bit--removing it balances that line with the cadence of the last three, and sets up the ending. I can't really explain what I mean, but if you read it out loud both ways you might see where I'm coming from.
Also, I'm not sure if I mentioned this the first time, but really love "ugly buzzing orchestra." I think it might be one of the strongest images in the poem, especially in that it inhabits a world that is halfway in-between pure imagism and the alliterative images that you pack throughout the rest of the poem: there is the repetition of sounds in ugly and buzzing, and then orchestra throws everything so nicely out of balance that it doesn't sound in the least monotonous, or, for that matter, overly jarring. I think it also works because all three of those are really ugly words. Ugly. Buzzing. Orchestra. "Ug," "buh," and "ork." Really, really gross.
And really a great poem.
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