Prerogativ

Sige na, sir! Hindi ako aabsent!
Bakit ganyan ka magsalita, puwede namang:

Sige na, sir! Perfect lagi ang test ko!
Sige na, sir! Quit ko na ang fast food!
Ididisinfect ko ang sahig ng senado!
Gagampanan ang kabuuan ng tungkulin!
Ang groupwork ay hindi pang-iiwan sa ere!
Abstain na ‘ko sa FB hipster quotes! LMAO
Sir, sige na! Aakyat ako pagkagradweyt!
Magpapahaging na lang kesa mambackstab!
Sir! Sagot ko na ang kanser sa balikat!
Sir! Palalakihin ko sila nang tama!

Ipatatarget ko ang bawat kaaway ninyo!
Lahat ay nagbitaw na hindi siya aabsent.

Intertexts for Ashbery’s “These Lacustrine Cities”

[ Poetry Foundation ]
[ PennSound ]

*

That Escher up (or below or across) there reminds me of Borges's structure in "The Immortal," doors and stairs of timeless design and symmetry but often leading nowhere. Doors and stairs don't have to be practical features if you're building from the point-of-view of immortality. The builders sleep outside* that magnificent useless structure. As "The Immortal" seems to be Homer, this also presents an "idea" of literature as vision and enterprise.

*

Thought of pairing Auden's lines with those from Ashbery. An exercise that not everyone might find agreeable:

Lakes × These Lacustrine Cities

Lake-folk require no fiend to keep them on their toes;
They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance,   

They leave aggression to ill-bred romantics
Who duel with their shadows over blasted heaths:
Into something forgetful, although angry with history.

A month in a lacustrine atmosphere
Would find the fluvial rivals waltzing not exchanging
The rhyming insults of their great-great-uncles.
Much of your time has been occupied by creative games

No wonder Christendom did not get really started
Till, scarred by torture, white from caves and jails,
Her pensive chiefs converged on the Ascanian Lake
We had thought, for instance, of sending you to the middle of the desert,
To a violent sea, or of having the closeness of the others be air   

And by that stork-infested shore invented
To you, pressing you back into a startled dream

The life of Godhead, making catholic the figure
Of three small fishes in a triangle.
You have built a mountain of something,Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,   

Sounded out each of Auden's lines and looked for the closest resonance from those of Ashbery. I think Auden is more given to narrative, to a clear exposition of cause and effect. 

This is a unique topic for poetry (though not for anthropology): the features and beliefs of people as they develop communities alongside (or atop, astride) lakes. I think "Lacustrine" is a formal response to Auden's "Lakes". Auden looks at lake-folk with their chiefs and rhyming great-great-uncles. He won't rhyme as they used to, he's leaving that, he'll sing in another way though of course cognizant of the source, inseparable from it. Ashbery's uncle is Auden, and he's responding with "cities," with the sound of cities, with pieces of effects and causes that might seem to stray, even fight, wondering how they could be sitting side-by-side, this apartment and that studio, but still somehow cohere in one pulsing view.

If in Auden's view God is "invented," in Ashbery what we have is a "startled dream" and you'd have to get pressed back into it if you're going to make your own mountain of something.

*

These two together reminds me of "Ozymandias":

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

Dali then, and his wonderful sand. No hope, maybe, but some regeneration is achieved in the constructs of the poet. The idea is derived from shambles. But I've yet to know of a civilization that was one idea. I imagine a main idea, a mythology, and then digressions and transgressions come from and go against and (sometimes) come back into it, reshaping it and the society it's supposed to have brought into being.

*

Recalling Hobbes's Leviathan, the idea we need a state because we'd be at each other's throats without something like a government to keep us in line.

*

Or, if a city, then a mountain of garbage? The poet is figured to be attuned to his culture and history, to chunks of it anyway (perhaps synced differently from others because of intense attention). And I'm thinking that yes, the last stanza in particular points in the direction of that poet building from the rubble. And of course, this solitary one:

But the past is already here, and you are nursing some private project.

*

I'm taking Guest's lines for myself, putting them right beside "Lacustrine":

The siege made cloth a transfer

learned from invaders who craved it;

spindle thieves. 

She sang high notes and pebbles went into her 

work where it changed into marks; in that room

*

Burning, until all that hate was transformed into useless love.

I'm grateful to have been returned to this poem, to find that I read some of it very differently. The "useless love" here, for example, seems to me something of high value. It's a way of re-figuring "unconditional love," where even one of the most basic conditions—usefulness of the love, of lover and beloved—has been discarded.

*

Yes to your implication. Hate your friends, said Nietzsche. Healthy stuff. But here's another angle: love that doesn't bear children. I've been trying to play this reading out with the rest of the poem, but it unlocks something and turns the whole thing into a series of sexual positions. It's like there's a hidden slideshow, and it ends in tears.

If I'm to be a responsible academic and connect it with the rest of the readings, I'd say that habitations could be "forced" toward the path of citihood, the teepees crushed underhoof. Loathing, pillage, rape.

Celibacy's another angle. I think it was Leonard Shlain who said the middle ages was something of a eugenics disaster for Europe, attracting the best and the brightest to don habits and cassocks, most of these thinkers institutionally kept from the possibility of progeny.

*

Then you are left with an idea of yourself
And the feeling of ascending emptiness of the afternoon
Which must be charged to the embarrassment of others
Who fly by you like beacons.

And "charged" makes another appearance, in something of a similar airy movement, but "charged" with (perhaps) a different sense. Sounds monetary, "charge this call to." The "I" here seems to be at rest, or in some state of stillness, while it's others that do movement, that transmit "like beacons". Others, and that distinct feeling in the second line, which perhaps would eventually lead to transcendence... but transcending toward... what? Something other than civilization?

*

That's worth re-posting and seconding. Indeed a gift, and I'm glad the rules say she must keep on giving! Paraphrasing her remark, these lacustrine observations elevate my own. For instance, she turned us to the plurality in the title and how the poem somehow specifies, zeroing in on a certain You. I don't have anything to add to that, except that yes, it's really got me to thinking more about the scope of this poem, something I hadn't thought of even thinking about before. Here's a thought regarding that from Calvino's Invisible Cities, published some six years after Rivers:

And Polo answers, "Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name."

*

It's this precisely. And my experience with Ashbery is that no matter how many times I read a poem of his (and what eloquent, keen, sometimes playful notions we bring from/to it), the poem remains an unpossessed place. And... odd, but I find this so reassuring.

*

My mother used to starch handkerchiefs and shirt collars for my father. It makes for crisp fabric. It marks formality, serious business. There's something even more serious, it's from the urban dictionary, really makes that connection with desire, but it might not have been applicable back in 1963 or 66. There are others that relate to being intoxicated, knocked out, or drugged. I'm not sure about these though.

*

Stepping back (but I think I'd still be along these trajectories) to test a couple of things:

Whose wind is desire starching a petal,
Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.

There's something oddly familiar about how this line was done, and if you saw the airport control tower in the second stanza, maybe you'll consider "starching a petal" as something akin to gilding the lily. In fact, if we go full Shakespeare (a nod to you), Salisbury will also reward us with the "rainbow":

Therefore, to be possess'd with double pomp,
To guard a title that was rich before,
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

So John's dipping back into King John, those last three lines getting us "tapering, branches / Burning," and... let's just do the whole thing:

Controlled the sky, and with artifice dipped back
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,

Into the past for swans and tapering branches, / Burning
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light

until all that hate was transformed into useless love.
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

The cities are "doubling" the "pomp" of the lake, adding beauty to beauty only wastes it ("embalm" and "entomb" was, I think, inspired). This is the classic problem of art, of literature. Perhaps Ashbery is touching upon the limits of mimesis as the measure of the poem. Don't go sending it to the middle of the desert to record things for you. The poem now its own "private project" which is something "no climate can outsmart" because, maybe, it is its own climate, its own body of water.

Starch is the byproduct of plants. Pure starch is a product of people refining what they found in nature. "Gilding the lily" is extended by "starching a petal" because you return to the plant something that's been extracted from it, now in tampered (or refined) form, perhaps enhancing the plant, maybe clogging up its pores and stiffening it.

If desire starching a petal is in any way like gilding the lily, then maybe this is a development "useless love". Love's not only useless, it's become a method of negating use, of killing (by giving back more of the same in adulterated form), and thus could be judged "horrible" if not loathsome or hateful.

Itself, the city is a crime of passion.

*

Two thoughts about this. First is Wilde's, 

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Which will end in—

Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

Perhaps you kill to preserve (the love, the beloved)... but is there any other way? If your answer is poetry, then maybe that poetry isn't potent enough.

The second comes from Noah. Those are tears of disappointment, the melancholy wrath of the Godhead (these lakes but remnants of that magnificent flood). It's an eternal agreement signed with rainbow flourish. This stops now, dear, I won't drown you again.

Ashen Bird Candidates for “Poem at the New Year”

[ Poem Hunter ]
[ Locus Solus ]

*

Read rationing in waiting "in line for things," but couldn't quite place it.

*

If the "great ashen bird" is Ashbery as phoenix—as you and the others have noted—than it also marks the passage of time (cycle phases spanning five, ten, or more centuries). The word "spiky" is curious too, and seems to me a mainstay of corporate meetings, seen in charts and progress reports: a way of telling time in terms of ups and downs, successes and failures. The use of "adjective" here suggests another filing system, the dictionary, which co-habits the time-keeping of the calendars and clocks as well as that of the map in the fourth stanza (time-space).

*

So familiar with this feeling. 

A sort of "time" that was suspended in the early nineteenth century was the French Republican Calendar. It was part of a whole drive toward decimalization. As always, reality would thwart "perfect" systems (showing that systems have yet to be perfect or that perhaps systematization itself is an abnormal, curious trait). The Leap Year tells us that the earth-sun relationship refuses to give us a whole number—365 is off, and so is 365.25, currently our most elegant solution.

The days are so polarized. Yet time itself is off-center.

I've also been staring at this use of the word "polarized," often a political word, but here it seems to carry also the idea of time zones (north and south poles), of long-distance (relationships?). And yes, since the earth is not a perfect sphere, it can't have a single center.

*

May I add to your list? I expected "composed" but was given "packaged". And while these may sound like verbal slips, off-kilter, perhaps indicative of a failing system, some of us might also appreciate them as inventive, layered, "the best way to put it." For example, your "O I was so bright about you" could mean so many things even only on the semantic level: I had intelligent ways of figuring you out; I was glowing around you (handsome, pretty); I felt intelligent in your presence, haloed, etc.

*

yet for all its raised or lower levels I approach this canal.

My first go at the title's "At" is that, well, it's the best way to sound it. Before or along with any level of meaning, the way it gets through the ear is most important. But addressing those "raised and lower levels," perhaps it's a poem that's thrown at the new year. Or, it recognizes time now (more than ever) as a place (as said). Perhaps it's just  coincident with the new year, one not meaning the other, just two pieces of a collage overlapping.

*

It's 29 lines. 30, if you consider the title a line. I was keen on this yesterday when I was thinking of French decimalization. It was two words short of 300 though, so there goes that tangent.

The first two stanzas seem to belong to a narrative (with many layers and branches, of course, but still, really, just one at least to me). Someone asked for the suspension of time in the first stanza. Something like this happens in the second stanza. So after these "packages," things are lost and that signals the third stanza: a list of world-self / self-world questions, and images of time (rush hour, fluttering pigeons) yield to the stillness of the frozen swamp, perhaps reentering the narrative of time having stopped while the consciousness keeps on.

Movement resumes after that double-size third stanza. But what is this "it" that slips past? Is it the same it that never became a gesture? Is "it" the great ashen bird?

*

Every reading is an act of translation. And yes, I always choose texts that I look up to, one way or another. Translating seems to me the closest form of reading. At each turn (as you demonstrated) we embrace the limits of any reading.

*

This would be an interesting basis for a highly self-aware poetics. Ashbery is not translating him into English. Ashbery is translating him into Ashbery. Which is perhaps as fine a way as any to manage these situations.

*

I'm going with "unavoidable". A pessimistic way of translating this comment is: it's all the translator of poetry can do.

Seeing it as a job means that the translator has come to absorb other concerns as part of the self: marketability, "the literary," posterity, previous translations, advocacy, etc. It's possible to see the translator as a "scrivener," getting stuff handed to her, handing stuff back. But what if translation begins with someone catching sight of something and seeing something of herself glinting in it? Maybe then translation would be a pursuit of that passing image, hoping to see more of it.

You need to zero in (that is the job), but the thing is elusive and you are left to your own devices.

And when/if you do "capture" it, it's already something else. For one thing, the smell of your pursuit is all over it. Finally, everything I said has been a muddled translation of Borges's clarity: "Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers."

*

I’ve been thinking of the little girl in your personal note, and so—as they did—I went to the Washington link. I’d like to give something back (which I don’t think is off-topic but is perhaps a bit off-Ashbery, though maybe not, considering what the owl crushes at the end):

Tomas Tranströmer and Robert Bly Translate Each Other’s Works
by Sandy McIntosh

Tranströmer writes: “You changed my line to: ‘The plow lifts from the furrow like an owl slowly airborne,’ but what I meant was: ‘The plow lifts the furrow like an owl crushing rocks.’ Well, I like yours better in English, so please use it that way.” Bly writes, “My English word ‘headlong’ means ‘rushing at something heedlessly.’ But I like that you’ve translated it as ‘He grows a head of enormous length.’ I send you several new pages of verse that go in the direction you’ve pointed out.”

Meanwhile, where there are no negotiations:

Kruschev thunders in 1956: “We will bury you!” after the Soviets explode an H-Bomb, and the Cold War is ratcheted up. But the correct translation should have been, “We will outlast you.”

In 1945 Truman demands that the Japanese surrender. Japan issues a statement that it will consider the demand, but it’s mistranslated: “We’re ignoring you with contempt.” Ten days later, thousands die at Hiroshima.

Early in the first millennium, Saint Jerome translates the story of Moses returning from the mountain with horns on his head, having been hung with them by the Lord. But “horns” could be translated as “a great light on his face.” Yet, for more than one thousand years, Jews are believed to descend from Satan. Millions are killed.

Can poetry matter?

*

"Un-file-able" too, maybe. Gesture seems to me a touch that did not land, so a gesture that did not happen feels like utter negation.

*

Thinking about this poem on the meta level, my two candidates are "this glum haven," "filing system," and yes, that "gesture". Perhaps this poem refers to itself as a glum haven, as a field of both flight (wish, angel) and limitation (sobs), one yielding and yielding to the other.

The phrase "filing system" occurs in a short catalog of questions (cataloging is a staple Whitmanian device, and making poems out of lists of questions became a project for one of his many self-appointed heirs—Neruda). Normally the New Year's list is a set of resolutions. Questions are seldom resolute (they "flutter," in a sense), and questions listed in this way (haphazard or seemingly so) doesn't quite come out as a full-fledged interrogation.

"It never became a gesture." Perhaps pointing to the futility of the new year, or of new year's celebrations, or of the poem itself. Or maybe the arresting of the gesture is the accomplishment of this particular gesture.

*

Still on the meta, both poetry and narrative partake of an off-centered time. "Now" therefore becomes one of the weirdest words. Whose "now"? The poet's? The poet's character? The reader's? And what if the poet returns to the poem in the future?

my song bird, once. Now, cattails immolated
in the frozen swamp are about all I have time for.

*

Care for a few more birds? JA's ashen bird appears to me as flying somewhat like Shakespeare's:

Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;

Definitely a songbird, but while there's a contrast in Shakespeare, the "sullen" quality seems to have pervaded JA's tableau (c/o pipe smoke) including the bird. What was once a hymn becomes "lettered" on the windows, orality becoming print becoming advertisement.

An earlier line from this same sonnet was lifted, rephrased a bit, and used by Eliot in his "time"-heavy "Ash-Wednesday":

Shakespeare: Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
T.S. Eliot: Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope

Whether these desires are related to the wish(es) in Ashbery's poem, you'll be happy to know (or have we not crowded heaven's gate enough?) that Eliot opens this poem with an aged eagle then recruits, towards the end, a crying quail and a whirling plover.

*

Once, out on the water in the clear, early nineteenth-century twilight,
you asked time to suspend its flight. If wishes could beget more than sobs,

Could the first line be taking us (also) to the Rhine? Wagner's "Twilight of the Gods" sets some key scenes there for Siegfried and Brunnhilde. (That's a "later" twilight though, and a bit later than that: Nietzche's "Twilight of the Idols".) Still, the whole thing ends in two immolation scenes: the pyre of Siegfried and the burning of Valhalla which would signal Ragnarok. Which might mean that the gray ashen bird is a raven of Wotan's. Either Thought or Memory streaming from that last stanza.

Men in Ashbery’s “Into the Dusk-Charged Air”

[ PennSound ]
[ poet.org ]

*

None for me, no. But I’ll take this one over a game of dice: “The Rubicon is merely a brook.” Might it not take offense that it was named for its mud (“red”) and not its water? It has gained the function of a border and a heavy sort of ward by virtue of edicts and customs. It becomes a measure of such stuff  which might not necessarily concern it: loyalty, audacity, sacrifice, transgression. Won’t mean any less mud, perhaps no increase in fish.

*

 we must / Find a way to freeze it hard. 

There’s a “we” though. And it's so audacious in its intent that when you return to the title, it sounds imperative. Is the poem itself the way of freezing it hard? And perhaps even more basic than that: our act of naming rivers, of making them human, holding “slumbering,” “remembering” rivers in our mind and seeing them “choked”.

*

Naming creates opportunities for rivers. Which aspects of it might be perceived (color, tranquility or violence, produce, deity association, political, historical, or even literary significance), which to downplay or ignore. All of these rivers named and unnamed meet in the sky, that one overhead “sea”.

*

But right after that (and catching the light) there’s something of a release:

Near the Escaut the noise of factories echoes
And the sinuous Humboldt gurgles wildly.
The Po too flows, and the many-colored
Thames. Into the Atlantic Ocean
Pours the Garonne. Few ships navigate
On the Housatonic, but quite a few can be seen
On the Elbe. For centuries
The Afton has flowed.

And at the end, I think, there was a (feeble?) attempt to “capture” stillness through minuscule “acts” of light:

The Ardèche glistens feebly through the freezing rain.  

*

If the Rio Negro
Could abandon its song, and the Magdalena
The jungle flowers, the Tagus
Would still flow serenely, and the Ohio
Abrade its slate banks. The tan Euphrates would
Sidle silently across the world. The Yukon
Was choked with ice, but the Susquehanna still pushed
Bravely along. The Dee caught the day’s last flares
Like the Pilcomayo’s carrion rose.
The Peace offered eternal fragrance
Perhaps, but the Mackenzie churned livid mud
Like tan chalk-marks. Near where
The Brahmaputra slapped swollen dikes
Was an opening through which the Limmat
Could have trickled. 

That conditional seems to me a way of returning to the first few lines of the poem where unconnected rivers are held within one sentence, by the thread of a metaphor sometimes. The disconnectedness seem to be stressed in these lines, one river’s effect doesn’t much care for another’s cause. But that possibility of connection between the Brahmaputra and the Limmat is wow, a killer. And maybe these three lines, this moment of wish and speculation—is exactly what provided an opening.

*

A young man strode the Churchill’s
Banks, thinking of night. The Vistula seized
The shadows. The Theiss, stark mad, bubbled
In the windy evening. And the Ob shuffled
Crazily along. 

Seeing these passages as if but one movement of unrest, perhaps a conspiracy or a long breath before a tryst, a big thing just about to happen. And all these players are reacting in their own peculiar way, all of them theatrical.

*

See the rhetorical (big) stick now adrift in the Potomac. The whole of it, and those passions and intents: swept away.

26th line of Eileen Myles’s “Triangles of Power”

Hung up on the “natural elements” that could number either two (cold night and digestion) or the more triangular three (cold, night, and digestion). I hear some amor fati in this gratitude. This poem seems an embrace of  the “low-glowing” appetites, the more immanent and base ones, even if (or because!) these get us running around in circles (from one January to another, and from each January “looking forward and back.")

*

Any trinity might be the holy family. Maybe we can read the poet's “fast-walk” as analogous to Mary’s frantic search for a place at Bethlehem for the impending delivery (where another “trinity” comes to mind: food, clothes, shelter). The transcendent great star in the nativity scene is replaced here by “low-glowing” hunger. That last part, where the author changed, that seems to me evocative of both the annunciation and the delivery of the prophesied baby.

*

Another triangle involved here could be Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The goings-on depicted in the poem are “low-glowing,” hungers to be found near or at the base of that pyramid. Poetry (along with other creative, “noble,” and “enlightened” achievements) belong to the apex: self-actualization.

*

And the pyramid on “The Great Seal” of your regular US$. In relation to this, the ampersands seem to be a good visual choice on the part of Mayer. Knots and all.

*

In the poet’s case, the delivery of the utterance. In mangers the world over.

naramdaman—pugad

On Bernadette Mayer’s “FIRST SHOW HOTLINE”

Out the somber window that shows
Hibernation trees, the water pump, the road
Nothing falling from the gray sky yet
The room I’m in’s too clean, the fire’s failed
I’m doing the French fries on the top of the stove
The mail’s failed to come, the turkey had no liver
But it may work to write this poem unless
It gets stuck like a car by the creek
The creeks are over the top, be wary 

Of them, of getting mail from a bank
And a flyer from the Family Dollar store
In which everything is more than a dollar
Except sardines, I don’t even have a bank
Account but I saw a rainbow in the woods once
          When the sun got low enough to shine
          Under the earth’s cloud cap, I thought
          That’s not a bad deal on dish detergent

*

[ LITERARY HUB ]
[ EXQUISITE CORPSE ]

*

Glad we’re warming up. And with such fine angles too. “First” has me stumped. “Show” kind of drives home the point that this is not a life (or a process) typically produced by TV and consumed by viewers. Szymborska once remarked that the poet-at-work is “hopelessly unphotogenic” as opposed to the lives and processes of others artists (painters dancers, thespians)—those were much more cinematic. With a poet, all we have before us is a person slumped over a screen or some odd pieces of paper. “Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later,” Szymborska continues, “and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens... Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?”

*

Would like to ride this tangent and add “soap opera” as a possible association of the titular “Show” and the last line’s “dish detergent”. This is a domestic scene, but one connected to the outside, represented and appropriated by the forces out there that try to shape our “in here”. I see poetry here as resistance. And I’m still unsure if Mayer embraces the frustrations or if she is hostile to them, sees them as unnecessary distractions, asks us to “be wary” of them as well. A cautionary note that could clue us in on what that “Hotline” is all about.

*

Well if attending to poetry isn’t poetic, I don’t know what is. I can feel your anger all the way to my place, but this also sounds like you’re about to read “Show” metapoetically.

*

Two views of these contractions. First is how it’s reflective of a poetics that refuses to sound all noble and wise (and maybe that amounts to its own wisdom). Next is how it tries to save breath, save time, save space in the household and consequently in the language itself—maybe the interior of the poet.

It’s really curious, and I think it’s fruitful how you pointed this out to us. Visually, it works so that all the punctuation marks are in-line while the ends are free from markings. Everything is perhaps swept “in”—which is a weird form of cleanliness.

*

From this juncture, the thought of how the operating room is sometimes referred to as a theater.

*

Here’s a link to an appearance in Exquisite Corpse on January 2015. However, this one has for us a certain “FIRST SNOW HOTLINE” by Bernadette Mayer. Either LitHub committed a typo error or it’s a newer (?) version. Then again, maybe it’s not a typo, as there are other differences. Family Dollar was “family dollar” in this one (as in the last line of “SARDINES”: “& shipped to the family dollar store for Bernadette”). In fact, aside from personal “I” and the “F” in French fries, there are no other capital letters (not even the words at the beginning of lines). This one uses an ampersand rather than “and” in line 11. The stanzas are also cut differently, “the creek” and “the creeks” going their separate ways, be wary placed more closely to “them”.

FIRST SNOW HOTLINE

out the somber window that shows
hibernating trees, the water pump, the road
nothing falling from the gray sky yet
the room I’m in’s too clean, the fire’s failed
I’m doing the French fries on top of the stove
the mail’s failed to come, the turkey had no liver
but it may work to write this poem unless
it gets stuck like a car by the creek

the creeks are over the top, be wary
of them, of getting mail from a bank
& a flyer from the family dollar store
in which everything is more than a dollar
except sardines, I don’t even have a bank
account but I saw a rainbow in the woods once
          when the sun got low enough to shine
          under the earth’s cloud caps, I thought
          that’s not a bad deal on dish detergent

*

Following you, I also prefer “SHOW” over “SNOW” because I think the second significantly stunts the line “Nothing falling from the gray sky yet”. I felt cutting the stanza after “be wary” had more power (was more “wary,” formally speaking) and increased the threat of “them” over the household and the poet within. The lines are around ten syllables each, plus/minus a syllable or two so maybe it does suggest the sonnet. Or a sonnet that has yet (or refuses) to fall into place.

This thread reminds me of the WCW exercise: which poem does the better job? (Which is a rather uninspired and inaccurate way to recall our trademark second essay.) It’s not like correct ideas will wash away all your sins.