Thread: Thinking Time
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Max Goodman Max Goodman is offline
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I struggle to understand this one.

"Then," beginning the poem midstream, following something untold, suggests that the poem is intentionally cryptic, or eager for the reader piece things together and maybe to feel in-the-know.

"love would blaze through us" brings to mind two lovers. The mention of the blonde will soon dispel this misconception, making me go to the title and assume that "us" means male clientele of a night club.

"within a second," parsing the experience minutely, resists satisfactory parsing itself. "Second" is a precise, measuring word. "Within" suggests approximation regarding the time. That precisely measured second is not the precise length of time it took love to blaze, but the container in which the blazing occurred. It's hard for me to relate this sense of time to anything I've experienced.

"just time enough" means "that's all the time it took" after I reject the initial implication that the men are under some time-restriction and have barely been given enough time:

"to scan silhouette": As has been mentioned, the lack of an article feels awkward. The focus on shape is appropriate, though I don't know that yet. The blonde hasn't yet been mentioned, so this still feels cryptic.

"fête blonde or not" is the phrase that allows me uncertainly to puzzle this out: The men in the club in less than a second evaluate each woman based on her shape. "Fêting" doesn't describe anything I imagine men doing in these clubs. (Maybe the in-the-know crowd the poem is for are club-goers who would scoff at my ignorance here.) Tip her? Applaud? Hoot? The decision to do any of those would take more than a second, I think. The choice of which women to enjoy and focus on might be that quick, but that doesn't feel to me like fêting.

"fête blonde" is another phrase that feels as though it is missing a connecting word.

"the homage honed on": I can't follow in what sense any homage/fêting is honed on its subject/recipient. The length or volume of the applause, the precise tone of the hoot is honed on the woman's precise shape or other qualities? "Honed" suggests to me more focus on the, let's say, applause, than I imagine applauders giving it, particularly in this situation in which the applause might draw less of the applauder's focus even than it would normally.

I assume that, despite their sharing a sentence, by the homage honing we've moved past that first fraction of a second into the time after it.

"fecund frame": This is strongly accurate; the more fecund a woman's frame--science tells us--the more attractive to men. It doesn't, though, evoke for me the experience of appreciating a woman's shape. My attraction to her fecundity happens below the conscious level.

"face": Yes.

"as the allure was whet": The allure (too abstract a word to aid the image, visually or otherwise) does the whetting, I think, rather than receiving it.

"Insight distilled through years of twilit blights" is very abstract. I'm lost. "Blights" suggests that this experience is negative. Or maybe, since I associate this experience with time later than twilight, and indoors, it is some unnamed blights that drive the clientele to the clubs. The insight is withheld from me--or I'm too stupid to understand it.

"till left in homes" feels intentionally cryptic. Again a connecting word is withheld. "Our homes"? The poem seems to want to be less specific, leave open a variety of possibilities. I don't understand why, and don't have a clear sense of what possibilities the poem suggests. Even "our homes" doesn't have much meaning for me as places where insight is left.

"beyond our bygone nights": The placement at the end and the line break suggest that this is the poem's crucial destination. It suggests a fellowship between the men (or the men and the women?), and again evokes that couple from the first line.

None of this has much to do with what I normally associate with "love." Maybe that's the core of the poem, the insistence on calling this love meant to prompt us to ponder the experience described, or the experience of the two lovers evoked by the first (and last?) line(s).

FWIW.
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