Peripheral

Dec 29 2015

A flicker of movement, the play of light.

You couldn't have seen

or weren't looking.

But flinched,

like a small animal

hair-trigger, bristling with nerves.

Trembling

                   ...still

                                ...alert.

The mind's eye

that sees all, in its reptilian recess,

in the back of your head

or creeping through the underbrush.

As the flickering flames

fascinate;

motion, too chaotic to compute,

yet soothes

hypnotically.

You find yourself staring;

dry, unblinking

the soporific heat.

An animal would flee.

But you are tame,

forgot

how easily surprised.

So much you never saw

yet judged, and weighed;

either quick escape,

or immolation.

I think there are many ways to read this poem, and so am loathe to document what I had in mind, or what I think it finally says.

I'd just like to comment on the accidents of creation, gifts of the ear. And I do mean "gifts": because my process is to open myself up, and then let the language find its own way. So here, in the sound "aww", there is a nice aural through-line that pulls things taut, running from chaotic ...hypnotic, to soporific ...forgot ...saw. (There was originally a calm in there, as well.) And before that, there's a nice little sequence of weren't ...nerves ...alert.

I've also noticed a rather promiscuous use of ellipses in recent poems (note the 2nd stanza, where they replace what were originally commas). I do this is for the same reason I use every other kind of punctuation (which I think I use quite liberally, compared to other poets (the beloved semi-colon, especially!)): that is, trying to dictate the reader's pace, in much the same way a composer writes a musical score. Because I think the spaces -- where you pause, take a breath, let the word linger and resonate -- are as important as the words themselves. So along with my armamentarium of hyphens, commas, semi-colons, periods, and line-breaks, the ellipsis gives me another tool with which to fine-tune the pace.