[R. Nemo Hill]

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My Portrait Of You


“My daughter partners me in dance,
we share this life as time demands.
—Yet time expands. —It births a child,

the herald of my own exile,
a daughter’s daughter with eyes beguiled
by visions I shall never see,

by a future where I will not be.
Her birth begets full vacancy,
the haunting queerness of not-here-ness.”


...................................“But you’ve always thrived on absence, fearless.
...................................We’ve always found in distance, nearness.
...................................You never stayed for long. You’d wave

...................................from the precipice of every grave
...................................you hurtled through—. The gifts you gave,
...................................steadfast in their evanescence.

...................................You always vanish! Your fleeting presence
...................................susceptible to circumstances,
...................................reverberant, an echo’s echo.”


“It’s the heart of me you know.
And it’s the heart of me that shows
my nothingness to me—through her,

her life a light that shines a hole
into the emptied chamber of my soul,
her birth another death I'm dying,

another skin I’m sloughing—trying
to breathe death in by clarifying
further depths—becoming ghost.”


...................................“My portrait of you? — : here-and-lost,
...................................now-and-gone, frontier-crossed
...................................by the muscle-of-a-backward-glance.

...................................Disembodied, still, we dance,
...................................unpartnered by the realm of chance,
...................................passing points of light who’ve dared

...................................to cross the cavern that we’ll share
...................................immeasurably — an un-selfed pair—
...................................our hymn a hole through which we steer.”
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[Carl Copeland]

For me, this is a dazzling example of how seductive meter and rhyme can be. Before I even know what’s going on, you’ve already jazzed me with passages like:

the haunting queerness of not-here-ness.

But you’ve always thrived on absence, fearless.
We’ve always found in distance, nearness.

Later: sloughing—trying. Pure jazz.

And how cool is that rhyme scheme? Triple rhymes, one line out of synch with the tercets.

There are places I’d like to regularize. For example, I’d replace “with” in S2L2 with a comma and lose “by” in S3L1. But that’s my chanting habit. Not your problem.

On the whole, I get the gist, and where I don’t, the music keeps me grooving. I was going to say I didn’t mind not getting the last three tercets, but after a couple shots of vodka this evening, even they made sense. I wish I had friends as understanding as this portraitist. My tendency to be “here-and-lost, now-and-gone” has lost me more than one friend.

I have a special file of “musical” poems from the Sphere, and this one is going in. Too cool, Nemo.

[Nick McRae]

Nemo I was going to wait until this thread settled down to ask, but you don't seem to need much help, so I'm just going to ask it:

Do you find that writing in meter makes it difficult to reveal the core of a poem? Or, in other words, to write topically in a clear way? This is a beautiful poem that I greatly enjoyed, but I'm not able to discern exactly what you're wanting to say. And I'm curious if that's just generally difficult to accomplish with meter, rhyme schemes and the like, in your opinion.

I ask as I've been taking stabs at metrical poetry lately, but my poetry has been so traditionally idea-centric that it feels like there's a conflict between how I'm used to writing, and how meter forces me to write.

Does it sound like I'm on the right track with this? Would a metrical poem need to lean heavier on the side of 'beauty for it's own sake'?

[John Riley]

Nemo, I’ll be back when I’ve had time to allow this stunning poem to circl my marrow bones, as Willie would have said.

Nick, you should ask direct questions about your needs another way and at a different place. We’re here to help each other with our/their poems. That’s what threads are for. Consider asking such questions in the General thread. You can also direct message.

A gentle push, not a scold.

[R. Nemo Hill]

I wish you had not deleted your question, Nick.
It is germane to the poem.

Nemo

[John Riley]

OK. I jumped too fast. I was wrong to stick my head in.

[R. Nemo Hill]

All our heads are in, John.
There is no problem with any of it.

Nemo

[Mark McDonnell]

I heard a dialogue between a parent and daughter, with the daughter's stanzas being the "broken" ones. I read the parent as a father but it could feasibly be a mother. The parent has recently become a grandparent, which troubles them and leads them to contemplate their own mortality. The daughter argues, and is forgiving of the fact, that her parent has always been an uncertain presence in her life and this hasn't been a detriment to their relationship. The broken stanzas perhaps belie this idea.* And so the dialogue continues. And deepens.

That seems to me to be the surface. The narrative. The poem of it is quite beautiful, profound and frightening and heartbreaking. I shall continue to let it work on me.

*Ignore references to "broken" stanzas. See post below.

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Mark McDonnell

I heard a dialogue between a parent and daughter, with the daughter's stanzas being the "broken" ones. … The parent has recently become a grandparent, which troubles them and leads them to contemplate their own mortality. The daughter argues, and is forgiving of the fact, that her parent has always been an uncertain presence in her life and this hasn't been a detriment to their relationship. The broken stanzas perhaps belie this idea.

Brilliant, Mark! A lucid exposition of what I sensed more fuzzily. It does make the poem more poignant if the second speaker is the daughter, but that’s something I didn’t get, if only because the first line of the dialogue mentions “my daughter,” as if to someone else. If that’s what you had in mind, Nemo, would you consider something like “You partner me, my girl, in dance”?

[Mark McDonnell]

Hi Nemo,

I'm on a laptop now (I really should be working) whereas this morning I read the poem on my phone. The phone gave it an odd appearance whereby words from the indented stanzas were left out on a limb at the left of the page. I took this to be a deliberate formatting choice on your part! Oops! (it was quite effective, honestly...)

So, to summarise, ignore all previous ramblings about "broken" stanzas.