This does not seem entirely hidden to me. It seems like a quietly savage anti-epiphany. The boy burns the shed to get at something: spectacle, anger, to see himself, or some realisation in the fire. Instead he is confronted with the realisation that what is piercing, real, are the things that elude: that present you with their blank void. The metre, broken and spindly, but with long enough moments of coherence to be detectable, seems so exquisitely balanced between the iambic and the anapestic, that it is flame-like, forked and twisting, and also forces the reader to enter into a state distantly echoing the boy's: staring straight at that which eludes. I do agree that the "eludes" line should be made more metrically coherent, it is the crux of the poem, and at the moment there is something slightly clumsy, rhythmically, in its phrasing. But this is not some imposter; it's a little revelation of smoke.
Hope this helps.
|