owls' strange glitter eyes low-wing'd on hilltop:
less than a city. a bay. late upturned ocean's
light, of an end november's thanksgiving.
to return bag full of food to an interior
emptied, alchemised of silence
presence only in this eremitic ghost's laugh:
i like this. some suggestions regarding linebreaks -- i'd break the opening lines thus:
ReplyDelete'owl's strange glitter eyes /
low-winged on hilltop: less /
than a city. a bay. late upturned /
ocean's light...'
i think that would 1) better emphasise the half-rhyme on eyes / less, and 2) give a (to my mind) necessary pause at 'upturned'.
the absence of an article before 'bag full' does bother me, but even granting your disbelief in articles (!) i think 'bag fulls' would sound better by providing consonance with all the 's' sounds in the preceding and suceeding lines.
at a first reading, i didn't much care for the last line and thought (with my predilection for 'moral' endings!)that a better place to stop would be "alchemised of silence", but over a few readings, the ending has grown on me and seems right now, the 'presence', the 'laugh' and the colon opening onto a 'something'...
no, actually, that half-rhyme sounds a little forced the way i suggested it. maybe this instead:
ReplyDelete'owl's strange glitter eyes low-winged/
on hilltop, less/
than a city...'
though that would make the lines of strikingly uneven length, which i like, by and large, but many people don't.
it kept me up all night...this is what you get with obsessive 'followers'! feel free to ignore them of course!
here's my thinking: i like the agglutinative piling up sometimes, like the large chains of sandhified adjectives in sanskrit poetry. ideally, sometimes i also wish it to be like the "sweet sanskrit" variants, like those that are sung, where it should both be pileable & yet easily phonetically & semiotically breakable- i don't think i can do that much, nor am sure i always want to, i'm happy sometimes to be just murderous & write train-wreck piles of sound, so sorry, no pauses, no breathing allowed sometimes ! & separate/separable line lengths don't bother me as the visual effect of print is something i sometimes ignore, preferring the "manuscript run-on effect" where the breakability of the sound is independent of visual/print spacing.
ReplyDeletei don't say bags as i don't want to distract the f from "full of food", & even if that phrase is common, i think the rest of the line is suspenseful ending on interior & so perhaps sort of worth it. besides all phrases in a poem can't be poetry-like & one needs some padding, colloquialisms etc( but this is a big, separable/separate topic).
not to be contrary to your well shaped ear, just a sense of where i'm coming from-