Hi Barbara,
I seem to be a poor reader lately, so take with a pinch of salt --
The poem feels assured tonally and in its motion -- but I find myself trying to puzzle out in what way these details -- which are quite mundane -- exemplify having 'fallen off the map'. Is it a sudden feeling of frightening and/or beautiful otherness amid the quotidian? If it is, I wonder if the language ought to register that more forcefully, strangely, and perhaps also account for what has precipitated the plunge into strangeness (emotionally, say, rather than via globe).
There isn't anything especially strange, fantastical or dangerous about a suburban dog howling or cars screeching through intersections, e.g., and I don't know how they indicate one's having fallen off the map, at least not here.
The gems and horns and fire -- a sense of a half-glimpsed demonic (horned) dragon on the beach -- is stranger, of course, and seems interestingly to marry up a colonialist's perspective of otherness with the dragon and what the dragon means on a map (danger and strangeness here). I think that's pretty neat and pleasingly compressed.
(That marries up retrospectively with the wanderers gathering the gold of the autumn tree. Maybe the poem is getting at a richness of strangeness that is always there, after all?)
Next to this, the domestic scene is anticlimactic -- surely purposefully in one sense, but I wonder about the line-ends 'I have felt hot' and 'I can hear' which might be overly anticlimactic in their pre-line-turn instances.
The poem is playing with familiarity and strangeness, but I don't know to what end yet.
I can't really parse what the ending is up to yet. The wild gleaming in the yard seems to be something like the possibility of seeing strangeness in the usual. This is further accounted for in the mark on the globe -- a sign that the speaker has been thinking about otherness via a kind of concretisation (familiarisation, too, and an especially aesthetic one) of otherness in the form of the globe.
So I'm a little puzzled -- but if I'm not way off the mark then I think many of the pieces are here but might need a little more pushing. I also feel as if there's an emotional element that hasn't quite come to the fore yet in this draft.
Anyway, I hope my fumbling around is of use. Thanks for the read.
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