The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poem Thread, 11/27/07 (warning: graphic language)

"A Little Heart-to-Heart With The Horizon"

Go figure—it's a knitting performance every day,
keeping body and clouds together,
the sky grounded. Simulcast, ecumenical
as everywhere, stay and hedge
against the bet of bouffant space,
you're the binding
commitments so worlds won't split.

Last week we had Thanksgiving.
The post-cold warriors held a summit
full of East meets West
high hopes. Why not hold a horizon?
Something on the level, equitable instead.
They said the U.S. Army held rehearsals
on monastic sand. In the desert,
lieutenants zipped in camoflage
thought back to where horizons were
an unmade bed, a nap
on the world's edge. Privates, nights
when they were sanded
by flower fitted sheets, ground out
in flower fitted skin: her, oh him.

This Michigan is short on mountains,
long on derricks
needlenosing heaven, making evil
electromagnetic fields.
"Talks on the fringes of
the summit could eclipse
the summit itself," the anchor
admitted. Go figure.

Your reticence, your serene
lowness, because of you I have something
in common with something.
Your beauty is do unto me, and who am I
to put you in the active voice?
I rest my case,
in your repose, a balance
beam, point
blank closure
that won't—bows are too ceremonious—

close. You graduate
in lilac noise. You take off
and you last.
You draw all conclusions
and—erasure, auroral—you
come back. But I am here to vanish
after messing up the emptiness.
I am here to stand
for thanks: how it is
given, hope: how it is
raised. I am here to figure
long division—love—
how it is made.

—Alice Fulton

This one's graphic?

I'm not sure I see it...

Interesting, but hard to get, at least for me...

That may be why you haven't had any responses yet...

Thank you for your efforts, though!

:hug:

Cheap, I know. But I really wanted this one to be read.

Hard to get? Okay, well, we all have different tastes. I read this as a somewhat goofy but still beautiful free verse ode to the horizon, which in this poem allows the speaker to explore ideas about communication, humanity, tolerance and peace. The voice is a little grad-school-workshop snotty, ("who am I /to put you in the active voice?") but other than the sliver of pretension, is lovely, IMO.

God?

The horizon here is personified as the other party in this exchange. It's a bit gimicky, (I think the author was trying to be cute, which, well, it worked on me) but still resulted in a great piece. (Yet your observation that it could have been, in a poem of another era perhaps, a conversation with God, is funny in the same way this poem is funny; it suggests that in the twentieth century of cold wars and secular liberalism, the poets wrote not to the dieties we once thought rested above the horizon, but the horizon itself.)

keep up the good work!!

.