[W T Clark]

.
.
.
Another excuse not to clean up
this morning: caught, dust swarming in a lightbeam's head.
Contagion: this little dust, little sugar of the dead I am here
to watch stirred into a coffee of ground light.

How un-easily 'coffee' shifts to 'coffin'.
I shove my hand into the coffin
of my ancestors, who I will not clean up.

Here is the tree that suffered
my climbing & revenged itself
with a broken branch & arm. Here are the cellflakes
of my pastness snakeskinned into light,
to curdle with my ancestors: cockroach,
plaster, brick-dust & the dead:
here are their ashes in their primordial soup.

& here are the hundred other women
before me who did not clean up:
the thin arms, aborted broom; the startled eyes
confronted by her dustfaced predecessor:

she is caught in a new religion,
forgetting the lithe fleshhouses of husband
& children — sacrilegiously alive; her tongue
stretches & rusted languages rattle
...........their keys for her;
as if she could housewife light—
throat full to retching with names she has never remembered.

I will never clean up again—
.
.

[John Boddie]

Wow!

Fabulous language here - S1, S3, S5. "Snakeskinned", "lithe fleshouses", "little sugar of the dead", "coffee of ground light", "housewife light."

You might consider dropping the final line.

I'd spend good money on a book that contained this.

It's a wonderful poem.

Thank you,

JB

[John Riley]

John beat me to it. Great poem and I agree about the last line.

[Glenn Wright]

I agree with John. The language is spectacular, WT. The Old English title and the kennings like “cellflakes” and “fleshhouses” remind the reader of a long chain of women stretching back generations into the ubi sunt. The speaker refuses to “clean up” and forget them, instead valuing the lore and memories that have been passed down to her by the ancestors who are now dust and ashes. It reminds me of the “Last Survivor” speech in Beowulf. I like the last line. Outstanding poem.

[Mark McDonnell]

This might be my favourite of yours, Cameron. It's really, very good. I like how the opening eases into the more rarefied language with its very demotic tone. Perhaps something about the looser perameters of non-met encouraged this. Anyway, much of the language here is really exquisite. I may be referring to my children as "lithe fleshhouses" for a while.

At first I wasn't sure about "pastness", wondering why simply "past" wouldn't do, and also thinking it perhaps a bit of a mouthful so close to "cellflakes" and "snakeskinned". But reading it again aloud it does work, sonically and conceptually. A very accomplished poem, I think. I like the closing lines decisive return to the speaker's present.

Mark

[Carl Copeland]

The Anglo-Saxons were no clods, were they. Imagine minds that needed such a word! It’s a brilliant launching pad for a poem, and the strikingly inventive language—“coffee of ground light,” “cellflakes of my pastness snakeskinned into light,” “aborted broom,” “rusted languages rattle their keys”—is well worth the price of the book, as John put it. I had a short list of nits, but each time I read the poem, the list got shorter. All I have left is this:

How un-easily 'coffee' shifts to 'coffin'.—The poem seems to demonstrate how easy it is. But you mean that it’s uneasy, not that it’s not easy. (Another half an hour and this nit would have evaporated too!)

throat full to retching with names she has never remembered—I’m not suggesting you drop the last line, but this one is certainly good enough to end on. I just don’t get the transition from wonder and deep memory to revulsion. Maybe that will come.

And, not a nit, but another of my perverse misreadings: I started out thinking it was the N who was both newly religious and “sacrilegiously alive.” The contradiction didn’t bother me, but I’ve realized, just before sending, that it’s the husband & kids who are alive. Leave it to me.

My favorite of yours too, I think, Cameron.

[Jim Moonan]

.
I had a sad thought: imagine if you had brought this poem to an audience that couldn’t see the diamond-like quality of your words and didn’t feel the quaking of the imagery present in the poem. Not everyone takes the time to read a poem to unlock its medicinal qualities/benefits. This poem (your poems) requires repeated readings and a meditative-like distillation of thought.

I say all this having been unimpressed initially with the poem. It was as if I was listening to a madman speaking. Then the comments came in and I gave the poem another chance, pressed my ear to it and shut my eyes tightly so that I could hearsee it. I zoomed out a zillion light years and saw the dust. I debated with myself if the likes of this poem would ever be seen in the New Yorker magazine. I think not. It would break the mold.

To say it in cliche, you're an old soul. You disturb the dust. To not disturb the dust is spiritually counterintuitive. Dust cannot be gathered. Either can words, in a way. We must find another way to say what we see and you’ve found a way, using words you sling together and rope-tie to being meaningful and imagery that is time-transcendent. (I’m speaking now way over my head; am groping at light, thanks to the vision you created in this poem.) Funny thing about dust: Its existence is an afterthought. I never think of dust for what it is: the bridge between visible and nonvisible— The oxymoronic existence of uninvisible dust.

I think the last line belongs. I like the ambiguity. I like what the word "again" does.

The poem makes me think hard about where all the flowers have gone. And that leads me to think of dust.

.

[Mark McDonnell]

It's definitely better than Pam Ayres take on the theme.

https://www.best-poems.net/pam-ayres...-you-must.html

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Jim Moonan

I had a sad thought: … Not everyone takes the time to read a poem to unlock its medicinal qualities/benefits. … I say all this having been unimpressed initially with the poem. … Then the comments came in and I gave the poem another chance, pressed my ear to it and shut my eyes tightly so that I could hearsee it.

I’ll confess to going through the same process, Jim. I almost always feel locked out of Cameron’s poems, but I trust him to have things worth breaking in for. Sometimes I never do get inside, but when I do, I’m rewarded.

[W T Clark]

Thank you, everyone, for your kind assessments. It is not my favourite of my poems, but I am very glad that so many of you have kept company with it. I wrote most of it when I was 19, I think, then discarded it for a very long time. When I rediscovered it its voice took over and I finished it in a dazed rush.

The final line is the point of most contention; I would be interested in how it is being read, and how contentious people think it truly is. Carl, is revulsion not part of wonder, especially "deep wonder"? And to un-easily, well, let me say that I would have not added the hyphen if it were simply "uneasy".
Thank you again John, John, Carl, Mark, Glen, and Jim (what type of poem would I have to write to fit into The New Yorker?)!