Hey Glenn,
Thanks for the thoughtful response! Yes, I had all of those other poems ringing like bells in the back of my mind--along with Baudelaire's "The Seven Old Men," which inspired Eliot's yellow fog and unreal city passages in Prufrock and The Waste Land. A bit of The Last Unicorn, Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein arguing about the invisible rhino in the room, and four or five other philosophers who argued about the nature of unreal objects (Frege, Meinong, Carnap, Ayer, and Harman). But hopefully, that all is unnecessary to know to appreciate the poem.
Hmn, wouldn't the grammar be right with "like you and I, / who walked"? One wouldn't say "me, who walked"? And also, "like I ... who think[s]" not "me, who thinks"? On the other hand, it WOULD be "a drop of dew...like me" -- so that's a bit confusing. Seems like the pronoun is both the subject and the object in that long complicated sentence. I should probably just simplify it and break it up a bit. I will try. I do like the "I" "eye" puns and the reverse parallelism. Let's see what I can come up with!
Yes to changing "rung" and filling in the missing beats (first draft, bad counting, posted too quickly!)
I lived across the bridge for years, always enjoyed SF, which always had drugs and crime and filth, but haven't been back since its recent decline--just read the news reports. For what it's worth, the inspiration for this was a dream I had of a strange (divine) encounter in a SF alley while I was living in Oakland in the 1980s.
In any case, thanks again for the thoughtful notes.
Best, Tony
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