The "Keeper"
 

Revision

If I’m an Eddying Pocket in a Stream


You’re like a leaf—you simply slipped away.
The current always meant to take you off—
you, little twirling thing that caught my eye,
as I caught yours. Life’s restive things don’t stay.

They’ll ornament the place they’ve paused awhile
and won’t get too attached—but just get stuck
as if near weirs of twiglets in a dip
at stream’s edge where loose clutter stalls, awhirl,
and then starts clumping up, a floating pile
of flotsam from the lettings-go of fall.

“Forever yours!” you cried inside my pool.

And then you slid between my twiglet-tips
back to the streamlet ripples scurrying south . . .
I sank into the silt beneath my mouth
but tasted your remainders on my lips.


Revisions
S1 L1: period at end was colon
S2 L2: first letter was lower case
S2 L3: added "if" after "as"
S2 L4: added comma at end
S1 L3: added comma after "eye"
S1 L4: removed parentheses around "as I caught yours," and period at end was semicolon
S2 L3: "clutter" was "matter"
S2 L7: tried merging with S2, then went back to having it as a separate line
Removed former S3:
I’d peered at you, a glinting slip of amber
corralled by my involuntary pull,
a standout in this season’s soggy haul.
S4 L3: Was "I sank into the bottoms of my mouth"; "bottoms" was "barrel"


Original

The “Keeper”


You’re like a leaf—you simply slipped away:
the current always meant to take you off—
you, little twirling thing that caught my eye
(as I caught yours.) Life’s restive things don’t stay;

they’ll ornament the place they’ve paused awhile
and won’t get too attached—but just get stuck
as in a weir of twiglets in a dip
at stream’s edge where loose matter stalls, awhirl
and then starts clumping up, a floating pile
of flotsam from the lettings-go of fall.

I’d peered at you, a glinting slip of amber
corralled by my involuntary pull,
a standout in this season’s soggy haul.

“Forever yours!” you cried inside my palm.

And then you slid between my twiglet-tips
back to the streamlet ripples scurrying south . . .
I sank into the barrel of my mouth
but tasted your remainders on my lips.

Alexandra,

"Keeper" reminds me of fishing and Jim's sonnet, but I'm puzzling over who is fishing for what and is self-consuming. Will continue noodling.

Ralph, oh dear, I never imagined that that would be unclear. Putting Jim's poem out of your mind while reading this one should help.

Alexandra, I enjoy the lush and graceful sounds in this poem, and the conceit is interesting. My feeling is that you could end stanza 2 after “matter stalls” (is there a more specific word than “matter”? not sure, but I wondered that). The rest of that sentence seems unnecessarily piled-on, since the image was clear to me already at line 8. Then, an added line to open the new stanza would clarify the move to the next image, the one of the N picking up the leaf. Without that added detail, it’s easy to think that the N is looking at the leaf while it’s still in the backed-up loose matter.

The poem’s closing image is fascinating but I am not sure I get what has happened. The leaf has continued on downstream, but why does the N sink, and in what way does the mouth’s being compared to a barrel relate to the poem’s conceit? Also, I am not understanding the move to the sensation of taste, since up to this point the leaf has been seen and felt with the hands, not tasted. I’m sure you have something specific in mind here, but the connection is not coming through for me.

Good luck with the poem.

Andrew

Andrew, thanks for your detailed observations. While I had been hopeful that my metaphor of the n as the dip in the stream where the leaf gets caught would come through despite my use of a metaphorical “palm,” it’s obvious to me now (both from your and Ralph's comments and my own fresh eyes) that that’s too much of a stretch. I had hoped that the preceding “corralled by my involuntary pull” and the following “twiglet-tips” rather than “fingertips” would make the n-as-stream-pool metaphor clear. (The center of the stream eddy was meant to represent the n’s “mouth," i.e., her receptivity and voice, and the mouth's "barrel," the inner limits of her connection to the world, to which she retreats once this connection has failed her, the “lips” her senses and most direct connection to the outer world.) But it’s such an odd metaphor that I think if it has any chance of working, it has to be made much more explicit.

Originally, my last two stanzas had explicitly presented the n as a regular human plucking the leaf from the stream, just as you suggest, but then I questioned how good sense it made metaphorically for the leaf/lover to be caught by some intermediary force, the stream, and then collected from it by the n. It seemed more true to experience that the n must be the stream-hole itself. Besides, it seemed imbalanced--too superior on the part of the n--to present herself as a human while presenting her lover as a mere fallen leaf.

I see now how “in a weir of twiglets in a dip” makes it sound like the leaves, etc. are getting stuck in twigs themselves, rather than my intended meaning--that they’re getting stuck in water that has gotten blocked from the flow of the stream by a sort of inadvertent natural mini-dam of fallen twigs. With the latter meaning in mind, the first three lines and the last two are actually trying to describe two different parts of a process: 1) the leaves, etc. get caught in a sequestered countercurrent of water and then 2) gradually, they become more locked in as they become enmeshed with each other and newly-fallen matter. I liked the run-on sentence here because it I thought it captured that sense of increasing entrapment from liquid to solid. And not that it’s sacrosanct, but I had a particular rhyme scheme going on in the first three stanzas:

AB(A off-rhyme)A--(S1)
ABC(A off-rhyme)A--(S2, except last line; C's added here for a sense of diversion and entrapment)
AB(A off-rhyme)A--(last line of S2 and all of S3)

I've wondered that, too—but I haven’t thought of one yet! Do let me know if one strikes you.

I appreciate your thoughts, Andrew . . . I’ll ponder them and see where it takes me. [Update--do the changes in my revision help? Can I get away with "mouth" and "lips" now? Or maybe something else would still be better?]

Hi Alexandra. How would it be if you simply lost lines 5-10? I'm not saying the poem would be done then - there'd still be a little bit of work to do on the last eight lines (especially the last two, for me) - but I think you'd be a good deal further forward.

Alternatively, for what it's worth, I think lines 1-4 are a great little poem in themselves.

Cheers

David

Alexandra,

It’s much clearer now and well worth the effort! Flotsam or debris or refuse in place of matter? I prefer flotsam.

David, well, it's true that if I removed Ls 5-10, the poem would still cohere pretty well (even sonically, I guess, despite losing the rhyme scheme that I'd described to Andrew). Maybe I'm just too attached, but I like the metaphorical texture and the visceral feeling (I hope) of this description of the process of the leaf slowly getting trapped in the pool--I think it gives a reader more of a sense of the time span involved in the relationship. And Ls 1-4 alone, while they may make a nice self-contained enough mini-poem, just don't say all that I wish to say. Particularly, I think it's important to emphasize the jarring irony that the "leaf" thought it was going to stay forever. Without this element, I think the theme risks being too commonplace.

What in the last eight lines do you think needs work? I'm guessing that in the couplet, you think that the mouth and lips allusions are not as clear as they need to be.

Ralph, I'm thrilled that my few little tweaks have made such a difference for you. I do prefer the word "flotsam," too, but I've already used it two lines down from "matter," and I think that this order sounds better than the reverse. "Debris" would break meter, and I don't like the idea of it or "refuse" because they carry the implication that the n thinks her lover was trash. I'm looking for that perfect "duff"-like nature term. [Update: maybe "clutter"?]

.
This feels absolutely positively lit with metaphorical language and imagery. You are lucky to have captured it. The subject you have seized upon is such a transitory thing and you have found the language to personify it to be full of possibilities and glimpses of something profound that I can't quite put my finger on. It's like you've succeeded in getting every thought/word on the tip of your tongue to spill onto the page. I get the sense that the N is literally writing the poem as she peers at the subject closeup, as if her feet are nearly in the water as she crouches down close to get a good look, all the while taking notes to make a poem from it.

Notes:

• I love the rhythmic twirl of the rhyme.

• There are some gorgeously expressed images, like:

I sank into the barrel of my mouth

• The sonics in the final stanza are completely aligned to the moving water and are song-like.

• My only "critical" thoughts have to do with the lineation of the poem — But to tinker with that is to disrupt the metrical, so I can only say what I think might be more distinctive lineations if this were free verse. For example, this line:

"(as I caught yours). Life’s restive things don’t stay;"

would be better divided, to my ear and eye; like this:

"(as I caught yours)
Life’s restive things don’t stay;"

• I love the word "restive" and wonder if that might make a good title?

• I would also consider bringing the line “Forever yours!” you cried inside my pool." into S3 rather than making it stand alone.

It's a beautifully rendered poetic assimilation of the minutia that makes up life. I feel lucky to have found a poem that captures what you have captured here.

.

I do love the general mood and the insights into impermanence of the poem, Alexandra, but by the end I am quite exhausted by the obsessiveness with which you explore the initially striking image. I am not sure that what you say in the second half of the poem hasn't already been said in the first. Yet even in the first stanza you use so many different punctuation marks (colon, em-dash, parentheses, semicolon) that my head begins to spin, begins to focus on your earnestness in getting your point across, on your control of your material—rather than on the material, the image, itself. The varying stanza lengths that come later just add to my feeling of congestion. There seems just too much for me to think about, which interferes with what the poem wants me to see and feel. I suppose this is an annoyingly vague critique, but it is an honest approximation of my experience when reading. And I realize I may often be guilty of the same complex pile-on in my own writing. But I believe there is a less rational way through such thickets, and that involves a loosening of one's grip on one's material. For me, there is a powerful poem hidden in here, but it is obscured by all your hard work.

Nemo