Long moments
pass
in miniature.
Little ticks of
soundless time.
It is just
a summer
afternoon
lazy and hot
in the shade.
I am nervous.
The wind
pushes my hair.
I encircle
the pole I lean on.
-Nathan Brand
-Nathan Brand
Nathan, I'm nervous when I read this poem also. There are so many tensions in the figures: long/miniature moments, soundless ticks, hot in the shade, being lazy and nervous (I might as well point them all out), and of course the last image is great. The sense of grasping and eagerly almost becoming an inanimate object which for you is nothing more than a given, much like the hair to the wind. With all the passive motion, I'm left at the end of the poem wanting the pole to suddenly say "hello" and push back.
ReplyDelete- John
Ooh, great points. The pole is such a given, and I really wondered whether it should be something else, something less suggestive perhaps, but I couldn't think of anything else I might find in a vacant lot that would even be the height of a child.
ReplyDeleteThe passive motion thing...are you saying that the wanting you are left with is good or bad?
-Nathan
It's possibly good and definitely not bad. The wanting was more of an expecting or an ajacent what-if-this-happened thought that was probably all mine. Not everyone would read it like that. So in this way I think it's good that the ending has a kind of cut-off lizard tail quality to it. The nerves in the poem make us want to explore the empty parking lot space completely (which you, the speaker, don't do in your laziness; so the reader has to somehow) for closure, and eventually we are met with this pole (no, I don't think it needs to be something else, unless you're struck by another thing), which stops the aimless exploring right there. The pole becomes the only important thing and, in the heat, almost unconscious, like a mirage or a habit (nervous habit).
ReplyDeleteI guess what I'm really trying to say is you could go one of two ways (or both if you tried): wake up the speaker with the only thing that's there, the pole. Or, leave it.
("Don't wake up babe / You're just too beautiful as is" - James Galvin)
by "leave it" i mean
ReplyDeleteleave the poem the way it is.
don't leave the pole.