Cally, I love the revision. There is more strength in each line. Each line is a poem and the space allows me to wonder. Not decide, to wonder. I am trying to escape answers in my golden years. All my life has been analyzing and making decisions. It gives us the dangerous determination that all things can be understood. What we don't understand is what is valuable, and memorable. My wife, bless her, has filled our yards with wild and domesticated flowers and plants. I don't know the names of all of them but when I sit outside as my knee slowly heals their being there is what means to me. I don't understand them and no amount of information will make me understand them. I've been trying to understand humans my entire life. I even focused my studies on history and philosophy and literature in a triple attempt to convince myself I knew, I understood, human nature. What a foolish boy I was!
I apologize for talking so much about myself "when the door doesn't stop the wind" says everything I said in seven words. I so agree with you. Let's look at the surface for a while. So much time and effort is spent trying to understand what is under the surface when art works to focus our attention on what we SEE. That is the challenge in poetry or any genre of writing. To use words, the tools used to attempt to carve out an understanding of our existence, to make images and realizations that can only appear on the surface. It's the challenge painters and musicians don't have.
This poem is a revelation of that necessity and an example of how what is needed can be done. So "when the clock looks down on you" don't be "the fool who reads into it."
I know I'm gushing. It's because what this poem does is so needed not only in the poetry world but in the world in general. Let us all stop trying to understand and instead look and touch and reveal. That's where the spirit wants to be. Where it can reveal to us the actual.
Thanks, Cally
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