little things.
little things
by sister goat
you put your bootprints on my brain,
tacked your tinseled hands to the loving tender tissues
(gray and grooved and
mostly unused)
muscled mucus membranes of my brain,
and i will never know your
wood grain ways,
thighs thick
as thorns.
born into and a
mess,
silt soaked dress,
i could not rescue you,
could not wrestle
with the river crest.
and now i lay
your crescent breasts
to rest beneath
the sediment,
love laced with the last
bit of sweat you
swore to me
over menstrual blood
and severing,
the tip of your index finger,
on your left lark hand,
i once heard that
hands are like birds,
but that is absurd.
your hands are like sand,
always slipping through
the words that wilt
for you.
I like this far more than the poem which precedes it today.
(just thought i’d say)
there is such thing as
TOO concrete.
Which one…’Slippery’ or ‘That’s not me’? Yeah, there can be too concrete, or too abstract, or too abstractly concrete in an abstract fashion…get your jackhammer ready!
I think i read another of sister goat’s that i liked. This one makes agile use of alliteration (same/similar beginning sounds), which i’ve always liked to use too: “tacked your tinseled hands to the loving tender tissues
(gray and grooved)”. Alliteration i think is used big-time by Romantics Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, etc.
Alliteration is a good sound device, and when used with rhyme (‘mess’-‘dress’)sprinkled, assonance, and others, makes for really powerful sound poem…so much so that sound itself can write a poem…within the context of the subject matter (in this case addressed to ‘you’ a perished loved one, or lover who left, perhaps?)
It’s the ‘little things’ that make life. thx sister goat.
“slippery” was a bit too vivid and guileless for me, but this poem, while equally lurid, had more to offer.
in any case, they go well together. i appreciate the minor themes which pop up here and there on h&h.