Cally's Don't
Dear Cally:
For some reason, I didn’t expect such a significant volta. I’m smiling. There’s a saying:
“Good, better, best,
don’t let it rest,
till your good is better
and your better best.”
After I posted, on the verge of mourning for you spacious style, I felt that the knight was too concrete for the context and style of your poem. No mourning for that deletion.
There’ no mourning for the rain that the door didn’t stop in the first line, because the wind is always in my mind when I read your poems. It also reminds me that I wish to find to what degree the poet Dámaso Alonso was ‘into’ the wind. His complete work is housed in Autralia’s new and amazing Library.
(I decided to skip here. I don’t know if it’s brave or lame, to do this.)
I can’t say I like the piss - haha, but maybe it’s a device, something like a noisemaker to keep someone awake. In Peru, at least in the very cosmopolitan capital city of Lima, store owners place lemons in inconspicuous corners.
I really like “when the circus breaks ground”, even though the clown gets bolted. The next two lines, after “the clown” are perfectly aligned, and how I dislike the tick tock tick tock that at this stage seems to mock my heart. I threw out the alarm clock and took off my wrist watch when my daughter graduated from high school. There are no clocks on my walls, but, too often, they hang on a privileged spot in my poems.
I love “the mob on the hill” and it mocks “the fervent crowd” because it is the perfect choice of words now! With ‘an air’ too.
Most certainly, the ‘warden’s eye’ isn’t nearly as evocative as “the curtain gives a twitch’. I wish I had thought of it as a ‘twitch’ when I wrote about “peeping from behind Venetian blinds.” Curtains would have been truer, too, but it was actually yardage of thick duck cotton canvas I pinned up across a panoramic window—urgently.
The winner is: “the runneling rain” — It’s tops! (Does it need another L?) The corrector is teasing me and the dictionary didn’t help, either.
I had not intended to expand during the nod of hurray I had in mind.
I’m trying to skip here and there..
It’s a quick deflation, the last two lines, the moon, the sun, their ‘contrary’ faces, so used to impart energy—this is one of many ‘good for you’ mixed in with applause from your crowd, in unison!
And goodness, that eye! It can now follow imperceptibly.. “Keeper” for “warden” is one more ace to your sweep.
Bravo! Bravo y Olé!
~mignon
*Mm.. Maybe it’s a draw between
the runneling rain and the twitch.
**Please, keep your now previous to final poems. I think it would be super if, after a long period of due glory, you had a collection of 'before and after' -- maybe even with a few words that may come to you later on. I hope to live long enough to hold and behold it. It's a tremendous gift to your "fervent crowd".
~m
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