Life And Death
 

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Life And Death


It’s just before dawn,
my tea is lukewarm,
and around my lamp
a nameless horde
of self-exhausting
insects swarm.

All wing, they are,
their bodies spare,
impatient husks
consumed by flight,
by brilliance drawn
to swift nowhere.

They spin, then drop,
like tick from tock,
settling down
invisibly
upon this page,
a ghostly flock.

At last, they rest.
I take a breath,
exhaling them
from here to there,
from then to now,
defying death.


(16 March, 2007—Petulu, Bali—)
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Nothing's perfect. But every so often, even less than that, a poem comes along that is more than perfect. This is more than perfect. It is a marriage of skillness and stillness. It is pure pleasure to hover wingless over this.
Thanks Nemo.


(Ha! I just noticed the time and place and it became animated in that time and place. )

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Or in other words, I think it's good.
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I especially like how this winds to the end. How the insects eventually land on the page. It has a classic feel, like a poem from the 17th century. A strong meditation on death and the dizziness of life.

It's good.

I'd say that "to swift nowhere" is in the range of a signature move of yours, and I think it would be good to try to avoid it. Yes, I understand how it's a very wonderful line, but it also feels like it comes too easily for you. It is also the kind of thing that far less skilled poets throw around less wonderfully. They are the ones who popularize it.

RM

It's quite good, Nemo. There's something delicious about the sheer size of the title and the slenderness of the poem.

Hope this helps.

I agree that the poem is very strong, and perhaps I am commenting premarturely since I tend to like your poems more and more when I read them, even if I have quibbles and reservations on first reading. So here are some of the quibbles and reservations that occur to me and might disappear without further ado as I read the poem more.

Love the first stanza. No quibbles.

In S2, I do like the sound of "swift nowhere," but I also get the feeling that "swift" isn't really meaning anything. It sounds good, and feels very poetic, but is perhaps a bit too poetically glib. Also, I'm not sure what the "brilliance" is that is drawing them, given that it all takes place just before dawn, when it's always darkest.

In S3, the word "invisibly" bothers me a bit. The four syllables seem too quick compared, say, to "impatient husks," and the mouth-feel perhaps isn't crisp enough. The whole phrase "settling down/ invisibly / upon this page" seems to lack to crispness of language that the rest of the poem delivers. Also, "invisibly" doesn't contribute much in terms of meaning, since I didn't expect them to be visible in the first place, and you end the stanza with a far better phrase to express that, "ghostly flock." In place of "invisibly," perhaps there is a less obvious adverb that can contribute more?

In S4, you're exhaling them but I didn't know that you had inhaled them in the first place. Also, if you're going from "then to now," would it make sense to also go from "there to here"? They seem to be pulling in opposite directions.

There's something about this - a working within tight constraints (similar, but not identical) - that reminds me of Edward Thomas's "Out in the Dark" ... http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/c...ions/item/2930

It seems to me a moment of extreme introspection, captured well.

I did just wonder about the exhaling of the insects.

Cheers

David

I love how each stanza opens with a slant rhyme, and then closes with that perfect rhyme. It's almost like a correction, a righting of direction. Little lifts each time, which I think matches the beautiful closing gesture.

Roger, I don't think the speaker ever literally inhales them. The speaker takes a breath, and when he/she exhales, that's what it looks like. I think that the leap there is wonderful, and part of the magic of the poem. And I see the "then to now" as a kind of return ("defying death"). Terrific, inspirational work, Nemo.

Strong form. Strong poem.

Jim, hover away, and thanks.


John, this one is from my travel journals, transcribed from prose to verse, and one of the distinctive qualities of those journals are their bug-stained pages, for the tropical air in Bali is always filled with something.


I hear you, Rick. And believe me, I do often often go back and excise Nemo-isms that seem too easily arrived at. I did question this one, especially since the word nowhere is more metrically ambiguous than anything else in the poem. Ultimately, I decided to stick with—but I am keeping an eye on it.


Cameron, I was finished with this one and still hadn't found a title for it (which for me, is rare). I hit on the present one in large part because of its scope in comparison to the minutiae of the poem itself, the sheer size/slenderness tension you were struck by.


Roger, I agree about the first stanza, it came out with such ease, and feels like an entirely natural marriage of colloquial speech and formal meter and rhyme. It actually came about when I noticed its first two lines, which were the beginning of a paragraph of prose in my journal, were perfectly paired metrically and effortlessly slant rhymed. The rest of the poem was hard labor, ha!

As for swift nowhere, well the swiftness is meant to denote how short the insects lives are, their impatience bringing them so swiftly to nowhere. The brilliance is the bulb they are circling, the only light in the predawn shadows. As far as the word invisible, well, it might be worth rooting around for a replacement, but I do kind of like how quickly the stanza is advanced by that one-word-line. Yet it's true, there is a tiny bit of a rhythmic vacuum there, so I shall ponder. As for your rearrangement of my phrases in the final stanza, well, when I first read it I thought, yes, that makes total sense. But going back, trying to understand why I took a less intuitive route, I found it has more to do with my eye than my mind, that what I see here, in front of me, the page, is the then, the past; while what is there, where the corpses have been exhaled to, is the new now. In the end, all the directions in space and in time begin to swirl in confusion in my mind the longer I think about them, and I grow more satisfied with that bewildered dance, a bewilderment that the clarity of your more logical equation might dispel. And as for exhale, I simple meant I inhaled, and my exhalation blew them from the page. I realize it's a descriptive short-cut, but the two-beat line seems to excuse such abbreviation of expression.


David, oh yes, the mood of that Thomas poem strikes me as akin to my own.


James, that slant rhyme in the second line of each stanza which becomes a true rhyme at stanza's end, that was really what held my attention here. I guess I've been hearing so many comments on the board these past months about strict formal fidelity that I wanted to see if I could have it both ways, if I could to hold tight to the form, yet give the form a little hiccup—but a precise hiccup. Thank-you for noticing!


Thanks, Max. The poem is so slender, as Cameron puts it, that whatever strength it has seems almost aromatic to me, like the perfume from a coil of incense smoke.


Nemo

Hi Nemo,

It is incredible how consciousness can vary so much with external pressures. I was not in a good place when I first read this and came across the inversion of ‘brilliance drawn’ and it threw me out. I am still not enamoured but I am glad I came back. The deft touch here now pleases me greatly.

Jan

Yes, Jan, the moment is as important as the writer and the reader, a humbling truth.

The root of that inversion was the desire to repeat the structure of the language there:

consumed by flight,
by brilliance drawn

I like that effect, the momentum it creates, and I will often twist customary grammar to accommodate it. If I un-invert the line, drawn by brilliance, it loses it sonic force, the word by is repeated, but the iambic metrical pattern is not. It's the combination of the two that works for me.

Nemo

My aversion to the construction is purely a personal foible Nemo. I did not mean it as a negative crit.

Jan

Positive, negative, whatever, it's all just a discussion, Jan.

Nemo