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Literature Text
In Clearfield the cars duplicate themselves
along the island-tipped Antelope Drive,
bombinating city to city: marbles spilling
across the contours of a tired sidewalk.
Every night I listen, knowing the darkness
of the room, the sleek stone of it
weighing down — it is too difficult to sleep,
to let my eyes wander the existence
of the ceiling, the lone bulb at its center.
I am a note, a song that curls on its side
to discover the chorus, the spareness of wind,
the groaning feline, the knick and knack
of a yellowed house slumbering into its edge,
its cul-de-sac — while the moon peeks
or doesn't, quiet behind the other silence
of the mountain that watches, but says nothing
as I do, each breath following another
from the place my heart rests, in search
of a sound indistinguishable, dissipating
like chimney smoke unwinding into the fall.
along the island-tipped Antelope Drive,
bombinating city to city: marbles spilling
across the contours of a tired sidewalk.
Every night I listen, knowing the darkness
of the room, the sleek stone of it
weighing down — it is too difficult to sleep,
to let my eyes wander the existence
of the ceiling, the lone bulb at its center.
I am a note, a song that curls on its side
to discover the chorus, the spareness of wind,
the groaning feline, the knick and knack
of a yellowed house slumbering into its edge,
its cul-de-sac — while the moon peeks
or doesn't, quiet behind the other silence
of the mountain that watches, but says nothing
as I do, each breath following another
from the place my heart rests, in search
of a sound indistinguishable, dissipating
like chimney smoke unwinding into the fall.
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Oh, wow. A poem. How do you write those again?
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Comments17
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Overall Vision Originality Technique ImpactGuess what, Will? You get the dubious pleasure of receiving my first official dA critique. At this point, it's traditional for one of us to provide reassurance to the other about being gentle. <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/w/w…" width="15" height="15" alt="
" title="Wink/Razz"/>Let's start with the title. I pride myself on my vocabulary, so when I have to stop and look up a word, rest assured that it's obscure. (To give some perspective, the last time I can recall that happening was with `Bringa's Women Are Thixotropic.)
That being said, if anyone isn't sure what tautophony is, but cares about fully understanding and appreciating this piece, they'll take the ten seconds of trouble to find out. Having done so myself, I was of course clued in that sound would play an important part in its interpretation. But which sound?
Is it internal to the poem? There are plenty of red herrings: deliberate as well as coincidental alliterations. It's the classic figure-ground problem; if I pay attention to the sibilant, I wind up tuning out the velar, and vice versa. But there doesn't seem to be a consistent pattern throughout, so let's look further.
Then it hits me. Each breath following another. (Insert Matt Groening's "annoyed grunt" here.)
Combined with the nighttime setting, this now appears to be about insomnia, or at least those last few minutes of quiet time before drifting off to sleep. The magic hour of the creative mind, when the critical faculties are shutting down but one's imagination is still wide awake — and when the heretofore-unnoticed random nighttime din can inspire, as I'm sure they did for this.
Moving on to structure. This is subjective, of course, but I am a fan of both enjambment (even across stanzas, as you've done here: free verse in the guise of something structured) and eschewing the upper case at the front of each line in favor of when beginning a new thought. Others' mileage may vary.
If I have a quibble, it's with the double hyphen in place of a proper em dash, buffered on both sides by a space. This is most glaring following a hyphenated word such as cul-de-sac — far better to give it room to breathe.
Putting it all together, what does this piece say to me? That familiarity doesn't necessarily breed contempt; that everyone needs a comfort zone, a home, in which to relax enough to allow inspiration to strike. And since, like Heraclitus' river, nothing is ever exactly the same: even a place as oft-trod as home can inspire, if you're open to the idea.
And it took some digging to uncover that nugget; so now I have the pleasure of both the discovery and the search.
So at last we've come to the part where you tell me I was trying too hard to make everything perfect, and that it'll be both better and easier next time. <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/c/c…" width="15" height="15" alt="
" title=" (Cool)"/>