Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Florida (state with the prettiest name)
Overzealous german instructor on cassette oversees this scene: mother baking florentine schnitzen cookies, Milky the dog snoozing next to my feet (sleeping like its her job), and me- well me here, repeating after the german instructor (ich fuehle mich gut? oder..) catching caramel whiffs as they travel from the germanified kitchen, feeling the beating Milky warmth, her back rising with her breath, the clocks in the house in hemiola-time... everything is crazy-circular, casuality and causation have lost their place (help me rolling tape german language instructor). I know this place is real but sometimes I get the faint impression that I had died and this is my mind recalling memories and feelings and piecing together in this strange theatre of my mind, "home." Sometimes newness is so much more familiar than old. maybe if I start writing more coherently the world will accordingly cohere itself. Do you find this to be true? a conscious choice, to be less subconscious and more conscientious.
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5 comments:
Makes me think "home is so sad" the Larkin that Annie loves and now I do too. In my last homecoming I felt the oldness of home to be too familiar, as to feel like a dream of a life that was oppressing my true reality (and what is that?). I like the contrast between your cosy dog and your german instructor.
This is such a sensory delight, in image and in language.
Creates a poem kitchen that I want to live in, and then seals the deal by inviting me in (with the second person), mischeiviously asking me if I agree that you should create the world more coherantly, just at the moment when the world (of the poem) is being completed. The last sentance seems to cheerfully nod along with the assumed answer, while the damage (to time and causality) has already been done.
If I could offer a suggestion, it would be that you double the amount of evidence that "everything is crazy-circular, causuality and causation have lost their place", load the beginning with more strangeness to uphold these statements and weigh the poem down against the observations ("Sometimes newness is so much more familiar than old") that dominate the latter part of the poem.
Home is so Sad
by Philip Larkin
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
i like your tags, also.
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