Sonnet #3 - apartment
 

THE EMPTY APARTMENT

Sometimes I think that people are the fingers
of God, like the blind ocean touching land
and life's a Braille that I won't understand
if I'm not touching you and we're not singers
kissing a song out of our mouths in bed.
Tonight I fumble keys in darkness by
my door and try to feel my way inside
to cook alone and watch TV; instead
I walk down California to the seething
blackness out there beyond the glowing beach
and stand a long time listening to each
heave, the ocean like the planet breathing.
It's done with raging windily and wild.
Tonight it whispers "Shush", it whispers "Child."

Wow!

Marcia

Not my cup of tea, personally -- it's a little too stream-of-consciousness and ephemeral for my liking -- but I'll give full credit to the poet for using some fabulous imagery and placing the reader firmly in the scene. The only technical nit I have is with L5. "Out of our" feels a little clumsy to me. Otherwise, I think this is very solid and I expect it will get a lot of votes when that time comes around...

This is appealing and immediate, and right there it's got a big advantage over the others so far. Nobody needs a second read to understand the scenario of head-over-heels love! And very, very few readers will take issue with any part of the argument, as happens too easily with poems 1 and 4.

Besides the relative strengths, the poem has some absolute ones. There's the stream-of-consciousness feel that Shaun comments on, conveyed by features like abrupt line breaks after prepositions and between an adjective and its noun. That effect is exactly right for the poem's emotional content, and it conveys the sense of tumbling forward into experience. The poem also manages to turn some standard rhyme pairs into great stuff by making them vehicles for the discovery of great images: singers kissing a song out of our mouths in bed and the ocean like the planet breathing. A great example of the way rhyme leads us to the unexpected, if we let it.

My reasons for guessing the author's identity have a little too much to do with people's recent life stories, so maybe I won't stress them. But if this isn't who I think it is, I will eat a hat made of Oregon beach seaweed.

Really effective! Probably my favorite so far.

Martin

I like the enjambment on this one and how it affects the flow of the poem. That rushing quality ties it both to the ocean and to the feelings of love. The images are inventive, and there is a turn at the end toward a quieter kind of peace.

Susan

I just flat out love this poem. Great ending. No complaints.

I enjoyed this and think it has lots of potential, though in some areas it seems more of a draft to me than a finished poem.

'Fingers' and 'singers' are not rhymes where I live and appear to encourage the reader to mispronounce 'singers'. However, I realise in other parts of the world for all I know they may be good rhyme. 'By' and 'inside' are not good rhyme, though you could argue they are near rhymes.

I read it through as prose first to get the sense of it and in doing so picked up a missing comma at the end of L2.

I think that L6 is missing one definite article, arguably two ('my keys in the darkness').

I didn't care for some of the enjambment: 'seething/blackness' and 'each/heave' did not flow at all naturally with the line breaks to my ear.

Nits aside, as I said I think this has a lot of potential and I did like the breathlessness that others have mentioned.

The immediacy of this is very appealing. Ordinarily some of the same things that David mentioned (the fingers/singers rhyme, some of the enjambment) would have been jarring and off-putting to my ear, but in the context of this life-as-it's-being-lived poem, they don't bother me at all.

My favorite so far, out of a strong field.

The opening simile is so elaborate and evocative that I hate to admit I don't entirely get it, but the metaphor, "life's a Braille..." and what immediately follows is so powerful that I'll accept the first simile on faith.
The enjambments "by / my door" and "each / heave" sound more driven by rhyme than by sense. That wouldn't matter a lot, except that the poet uses some imperfect rhymes elsewhere, so to my ear the slight strain to get these perfect ones seems gratuitous.
These aren't big matters. The consistent and cumulative imagery is lovely -- the way that the scene is developed for extended meaning and feeling. The repetition "It whispers... it whispers" mimics the repetition of the waves and of the associated feelings perfectly. This will be hard to beat.