Thanks, Mary, such an appreciation from a forest girl like you is precious praise. Your reaction to the constant re-occurrence makes sense in light of more recent natural developments, but to tell you the truth there was a bit of horror in its original conception. This was the tropics where life runs riot, and can seem almost menacing (especially as dark falls in a foreign land!). So there is an undeniable element in the voice here of an exhausted Werner Herzog standing on his unruly movie set in the Amazon jungle and saying, "Look all around us, everything is fornicating, fornicating." That such relentlessness makes for ultimate survival is the complex icing on the rapidly melting cake.
John and Phil have both focused on the two moments in the poem that I was most hesitant about. It wasn't wooden that irked me, Phil, it was whitened, but both are quite suddenly literal. In the end that literal quality seemed to be connected with the moon's promise, a promise which I am not sure was kept before wood and whiteness were swallowed by shadow. And John, the original phrase was moist green gown grays, so I did cut it down some. This poem is from a much longer poem, much longer, six pages or so, which I wrote many years ago, on Dominica, under such a canopy, a poem in which my self-indulgences ran as wild as the jungle. I had filed it away and only recently stumbled on it, pulled out small fractions of it, and shaped them into this post. I clipped and pruned so many of my mannerisms, that I think I ended up keeping the admittedly over-the-top alliteration of green gown grays almost as a tip of the hat to the original. I am ok with it now, but who know when I stumble on the poem in a few years if it too will be adjusted.
Jim, I can't tell you how many times I have gone searching for a rhyme in a poem I am reading, only to come up empty-handed, and yet still haunted by it during subsequent readings.
That's what we get for reading with more than our conscious minds!
Nick, I really was not channeling any voice other than my own in the poem, I seldom consciously emulate any other writer or cultural player. My time on Dominica was spent pretty much in isolation with nature, so the only voice here is the voice of the jungle filtered through my own mind and pen. I do wonder about your characterization of the Caribbean as non-Western. Certainly there are other elements in the culture there, African, East Indian, but those elements are present in many parts of the West, and geographically the islands are well within our cultural sphere. I also wonder why ghosts and heaven seem out of tune with a mystic viewpoint. Ghosts seem entirely universal to the planet, and heaven and the heavens can often be interchangeable in common parlance. Still, I was not trying to channel anything but my own reactions, pretty visceral ones, to the landscape. I may be guilty-as-charged of taking extra laps for the fun of it, but you should have seen the original, ha! This one seem positively austere in comparison.
Thanks all.
Nemo
|