Hi!
We've actually met when you were a guest in Professor Jarman's formal poetry classes in fall of 1998. At the time, you expressed some measure of dissatisfaction (it wasn't entirely clear how much) with your poem "El Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio," a poem I enjoyed greatly. Unfortunately, you didn't really have time to tell us more about what exactly you were less than fully happy with. I'm posting the poem below for the other board denizens to read, and I was hoping you could tell me (us) what its strengths and weaknesses are in your opinion.
P.S. Colorado Springs has some lovely scenery, doesn't it? It's a small world and all that...
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El Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio
No one recollects where the Spaniards died.
A rescue party found their armored bones,
thought their souls estranged from the love of God;
so the river was named and flowed on past,
bearing no knowledge of its wandering spirits,
cupped to baptize newborns in the valley.
My people came here when the coal mines started,
fed their young on Rockefeller’s scrip.
In late summer, stilled by the weight of leaving,
the hot, exhausted railyard seems to ache.
The red-haired boyhoods of my father’s clan
become the stuff of anecdotes with coffee.
In boarded businesses and weed-cracked streets,
few recall them. Under a secret sign,
the eye and compass, ancestors lie buried,
but I have never been to see their graves.
My people’s time beside the Purgatoire
was brief--far briefer than our scattering.
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Steven Schroeder
Darwin's Bulldog