bend through the hazy shroud of
absentlight, like a looping tie
around lonely north-pole glaciers
-“encrypted foolishness, stop
why don’t you stop straggling
empty”-
wrangling abstractions, trees
think while shaking solitary snow
off naked bones like a frantic
wet dog epileptically spasming
unwanted water.black ink!
-“death love sex family mean
ing(s, food travel adventure
empty”-
ripping out his roots, noname,
quietest of all the trees,
rapidly crawls away on his
new-found legs like a spider
creeping toward the unheard-of
candy caves - leaving thousands
o f s m a l l t r a c k s t o
f o l l o w i n t h e s n o w.
your poem is beautiful. it struck up some pretty amazing images in my mind. i appreciate your playing with form as well.
i especially liked:
and:
There is a strange mixture of animal nature and human animal nature (words like abstraction, ink, epileptically).
I am bothered by the three uses of ‘like’. whether or not thats justified at all, i’m not sure. maybe using it once or twice is alright…but three within a short (ish?) poem isn’t my taste. but thats me nit picking.
thanks
Thanks for the feedback Alex. I completly understand your point; I had the same objection in my own mind when I wrote the piece. Maybe I should change: new-found legs like a spider, to: new-found legs as a spider?
But I’m uncertain if that will create a mixed-metaphor. My problem is that I don’t want the tree to become a spider, I just want it to walk like one; the similie seems to work the way I intended in the readers head, but will it if I use as instead of like? I’m not sure, what do you think?
i see what you mean. either leave it as it is, or, if you feel like, you can take out one ‘like’ and add the other simile: as.
or use words like: resembling, mimicking, portraying, copying, etc.
