I want to be accessible, writing
Lilacs onto a dead sheet, rhyme the screen
With these pages, praising not rewriting
Berrigan, or Eliot. At nineteen,
This wouldn't change, still a screen, just rhyming
Harder and not knowing I don't know; then
History would end, lending its timing
To height, not distance, an unenjambed "when"
When everyone I know was meant to last
And "accessible" meant "slow." Every word
Was fast enough for me, but still too fast
For everybody else, and it occurred
To me then I don't want to write about
Lilacs, or slow down to let myself out.
Lilacs onto a dead sheet, rhyme the screen
With these pages, praising not rewriting
Berrigan, or Eliot. At nineteen,
This wouldn't change, still a screen, just rhyming
Harder and not knowing I don't know; then
History would end, lending its timing
To height, not distance, an unenjambed "when"
When everyone I know was meant to last
And "accessible" meant "slow." Every word
Was fast enough for me, but still too fast
For everybody else, and it occurred
To me then I don't want to write about
Lilacs, or slow down to let myself out.
2 comments:
Lovely. The reference to being apparently 19 lends an interest to me, I suppose since that is when I wrote my first sonnet.
"Lilacs on a dead street...." is a fascinating and loaded metaphor, it seems, though presently the significance eludes me.
Aye, rewrite none, follow in their footsteps if anything.
Accessible translates to "slow" on the pc sceen and the worldwide web? That is interesting to ponder.
The more I consider it, the more intriguing it seems...who is speaking? History ending? Timing, enjambment, when, height and depth...very interesting.
Playing a Shakespeare with "when"/When?
I like it.
"writing / Lilacs onto a dead sheet" is hijacked from T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," portioned from the first two lines:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land
The "nineteen" reference is there because that is when I first remember being told that my work was "urbane," a word used by a college professor, which I take now to have been code for "opaque," and of course even back then it was a screen and not paper onto which I wrote.
"History would end" is because the timeframe in question would have been the mid-90s, sometime after Fukuyama wrote "The End of History," a book about politics that predicted the final triumph of liberal democracy.
"Slow" and "slow down" and "fast" are all references to talking too quickly.
I am glad you enjoyed it. It's a bit cracked, without true iambic pentameter, but rather an attempt to create the illusion of meter.
I am not fond of the last line, which is a bit ... I don't know what, but it's a bit broken because "Lilacs" is a trochee and I have to shift gears somewhere in that line. It was rewritten a half-dozen times and I still don't like it.
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