[Allen Tice]

I done seen it before, and all I can say, squire, is I never done it, and he din't too.

[Donna English]

I dunno? I'm not getting homelessness from this at all. Endowed, button holes, safety nets, petty cash, station, suits--sounds more like bankers. Their beards are not scraggly and dirty, they are soft and gray which sounds more like age and refinement. It seems purposely misleading, but I don't understand why it's that way. If it's making a point, I don't get it at the moment. Maybe out of work homeless Wall Street Execs??


And I don't get morning ash at all. What the heck is morning ash? Is that different than afternoon ash

Donna

[Petra Norr]

This poem leaves a lot of questions.
One example is in the first line:

Our beards are soft and gray as morning ash

It's important to consider the POV here. This is not some Poundian observer seeing bearded faces at a (metro) station; this IS one of the bearded faces. So presumably it's not a scene seen from a distance, blurring together or dissolving. My question, then, is why is the narrator telling us his beard is soft? It must an important detail, because in my opinion beards usually are not soft -- short beards, anyway, can be prickly. So what's up with the soft beards? Do homeless people have soft beards?

Another line to question:
the cold, erasing rain may knit us suits.
I want to like this line, but it's too contradictory: the rain is erasing (= deleting) yet at the same time it is knitting (= creating). Something is wrong with the choice of words in this line.

Here's a line I like:
And if this station cracks beneath our boots,

I wish I liked the rest of the poem. My guess is, the poem is trying hard to be "special" but it just ends up 'erasing' itself in the process.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Michael and I are on exactly the same page here.

Nemo

[Carol Taylor]

It's a painting as much as a poem, and you wouldn't look at a painting and complain it's obscure or puzzling (at least I hope not) - you'd go with it.

Wrong. Is a painting exempt from the need to communicate?

Carol

[R. Nemo Hill]

Is logical articulation the only form of communication? Nay.

Nemo

[Susan McLean]

I don't particularly like the style in which this is written, having a preference for poems that make more literal kinds of sense. Nevertheless, like Wendy I thought that this was about homeless men at a station. "Holes in safety nets" or "cracks" are what they have fallen through, and "petty cash" is the spare change they are asking for as they "buttonhole" passersby. The beards are long because they don't shave, gray because they are old (and possibly have cigarette ashes in them), and the parables are probably about the poor and how they should be treated. The only kind of sense I could make of knit suits was that very cheap "leisure" suits are sometimes made of double-knit. I suspect that the boots are cracked and that "vagary" is describing the men's general manner and suggestive of "vagrant." "Bloomfield" is no doubt a real place, but ironic in contrast to the poem's content.

Susan

[Philip Quinlan]

Well, I don't get commuters or homeless people, and I certainly don't get any emotion whatsoever.

Fridge magnets is what I get.

I guess we'll have enlightenment, if at all, only when the culprit is named.

P

[David Anthony]

I read it initially as a commentary on penitent investment bankers: "us suits" seemed a giveaway.
Then I realised I'd misread Bloomfield as Bloomberg.
Best regards,
David

[Seree Zohar]

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