[Gail White]

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."

[Marcia Karp]

Wow!

Marcia

[E. Shaun Russell]

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...

[Maryann Corbett]

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.

[Martin Rocek]

Really effective! Probably my favorite so far.

Martin

[Susan McLean]

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

[Richard Wakefield]

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.

[Vernon Sims]

I applaud the originality of this one. Love is a common subject for the sonnet, but is is fresh and lively in this one. This is a strong contender.

[Jean L. Kreiling]

I find this appealing in a number of ways; I especially like the idea in the first few lines, and later, the ocean's big, heaving, but non-wild breaths, which we feel as much as see. But I found myself wishing that the focus on touch (introduced at the start) had remained the focus; I didn't quite follow the shift to sound (with the "singers"). In the penultimate line, "windily and wild" works as music, but is grammatically quirky. Still, this casts a spell, as fine poetry does.

Best,
Jean

[Marybeth Rua-Larsen]

My favorite so far. I'm won over by its exuberance, its breathlessness, its depiction of love in its best, child-like sense -- open-armed and accepting of its vastness. I rarely try and write a sonnet about this kind of love, which is so difficult to pull off, and it makes me all the more enamored of it.

Marybeth