< 8 flower tales >

[rayheinrich]

I'm not sure what it says about my mood this morning, but I was particularly drawn to the fatalism of 4 and 8.  Using not-kus to somewhat confuse (con-fus?) the reader who must have labels for all things makes life just that little bit more flowery.

       

And of course, both 3 and 8 are Fibonacci numbers, and we all know that flowers are properly Fibonacci'd because the internet hasn't shut up about that...

                 

but I digress.  I think.  

And me, I like white space.  Silence allows you to gather your own thoughts.  

And "Americans" are always bemoaning those "dreadful" "foreign" films.
Those ones that have the temerity to pause between "action sequences" to allow
for "thought" -- whatever that is.

Much is sensual here.  Mouths, curves, hands.  Sprouting, shooting, swallowing.  There is vitality, but a soft awareness of a more eternal cycle.  

You are too kind, milady.

I wonder, are there any mysteries that the bees haven't already figured out?

How to keep us from stealing their honey?

And as for bees!.

I know you profess to be less than enchanted with her poetry.
(It's not her, I suspect; it's just that you can't stand her obnoxious cultists -- which, truly, I hate as well.)

But Plath's bee poems RULE (dude).

                                                2 -  
                                                   
                                                the rush of sprouting  
                                                of shoots                      2nd "of" sounds awkward
                                                pushing aside old leaves  
                                                   
                                                of stems ascending  
                                                as the buds    
                                                inflate to airy flowers

You're right. I read it so many thousand times that I MADE it work in my head.
I thought of changing that line to "the rush of shoots", but I think adding a "the"
making it "of the shoots" works as well and (important to me), it preserves the geometry.
Changed it. Work for you?

Well, I'm growing to hate blank space. Scrolling's such a bother without a proper keyboard!

Ha, yeah, I just tried reading it on my smart phone. Just about burned my fingertip.
But: Proper art requires suffering.
And, since the 8 are also poems in and of themselves, I think they deserve their own space.

[And I just finished rewatching "Frost & Fire", plus a few other episodes of Adventure Time. I'm gonna comment at all this again with those in mind.

Adventure Time! I'm unworthy to have my words surround its very name.

                                                our mouths open    
                                                and flowers tumble out   As before, I don't exactly see why "tumble" instead of "fall". The more varied meanings of fall makes for a more novel read, methinks: vomiting rainbows (funny), fluttering moths (horrific), both--

If I were to change it, it couldn't be "fall" as these poems are mostly constructed using
iambs (and anapaest's when the first two syllables are really short) so "fall" would
mess up the rhythm.

The replacement would need to be a two syllable word with the stress on the first syllable.

                                                the rush of sprouting  
                                                of shoots    A bit thrown by the lack of a comma here. But not enough for a change of styles.
                                                pushing aside old leaves  
                                                   
                                                of stems ascending  
                                                as the buds    
                                                inflate to airy flowers   "Airy" speaks "farts and balloons" to me; with "inflate", those silly thoughts could easily overpower "flowers".

I'm open to suggestions. You write me a better one and I'll be happy to steal it from you and put it in.

                                                the bees warn us   Breezy!
Second run: I love this line so much now. Vivid, strong, and loaded perfectly: oh! Not unique on its own, sure, but the perfectest little cog in the machine!

Great! Cause it's one of my FAV's as well.
 

                                                wheels
                                                their axles    
                                                through the ground  
                                                   
                                                swerve over us  
                                                with the curve    
                                                of the sky   Segment I don't entirely understand yet. I'll return some other time with hopefully better understanding. For now, "their axles / through the ground" makes me see actual axles running piercing mother earth (oohlala), and "swerve over us" feels like an aborted image (oh my dearest).

When you look at a cut flower, the flower is a wheel and the stem is the axle.

But this one is maybe too cute as it's a bit of a pun:

Cars have "wheels" and "axles" and they "swerve" when they go around a "curve".

God will punish me for this.

 

                                                   
                                                the waste basket  
                                                holds    
                                                these yellow flowers   Back to the flowers, now duly described. Here, we get to the height of the last two segments: now, the stars, the flowers, and the lovers are one. But now, it is past afternoon, and there shall be no nights in white satin for these sweets (haha!) -- it passed not to joy, but to sadness, to sorrow, to stains on the sheets and bits on the bedpan, to sleep....

               

The repetition of styles here from the fifth part's first strophe feels funky, though, in a bad way. "Holds" could be a fuller word, and it could perhaps be expanded into its neighbors; and does it have to be waste basket? That image feels somewhat too strong for the rest of it, especially with the very explicit next stanza.

I changed "waste basket" to "dustbin" just for you.

Second run: question more for editorial purposes, really. What in Glob's name is the difference between a stanza and strophe, exactly?

A "stanza" is a physical unit which is usually a unit of meaning as well. It consists of the lines grouped
between the blank lines of a poem. (Though some use it as a unit of meaning without spatial bounds.)

People want to use "strophe" for the blank-lined divisions of free-verse poems and save "stanza" for
strictly ordered poems like this one. I use "stanza" for both and leave "strophe" to the Greeks.
(People also use "strophe" as a unit of meaning without spatial bounds. But these tend to be those awful
prose and script-writers and what do they know?)

                                                tears    
                                                you're not sure  
                                                who they're for   See? This is the most, well, obvious, direct bit of the whole piece, and this is very good in hammering the last nail upon, but "the waste basket" sort of waters down the salt. As much as soft movements are nice, at least in this case, the sudden surprise just feels more natural, or at least more poetical.
                                               
 
                                                the roundness    Here's where I would expect a break in format: now leaning into that other poet I've read a lot of (though not yet nearly as much as he has released), I think this stanza would be better fused with the earlier one. The numerical break feels too far a distance, and the earlier part too ungraceful alone.

But I got to keep my lines all pretty. So I guess it's a bit of form over function for this one.

[                                                 after the steady    
                                                flowing    
                                                of years   Ah. Nice one.
Second run: I will always love the word "steady", especially at the end of a line.
                                                   
                                                the grace  
                                                of our hands  
                                                turns to flowers   "turns to" could just as well be "becomes", but of course "becomes" has fewer meanings than "turns to". Now here, I'm not sure what on that point you're exactly stating, so a bit of enlightenment's welcome.

The multiple meanings of "turns to" (as you stated) are necessary to support the multiple metaphors.
But the meaning is kinda more simple than you imagine. (And it's more puns again.)

Grace is elegance - flowers are elegant

Dancers are elegant - "turn" is something they do, we do, flowers do (following the sun, life).

At death our hands reTURN to the earth and the flowers that grow from the earth exhibit their grace
-- in both a mystical and physical sense.

Grace is God loving you, is being free of sin, is salvation, is transcendence...
People commonly "turn to" God.

And there's this Shaker dance song:

"Simple Gifts" by Elder Joseph

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free
    'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
    'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained,
    To bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
    Till by turning, turning we come 'round right.