Today I am exhausted from packing up my life into brown boxes, from taking down my pictures, setting away my books, and from picking my clothes out of a suitcase everyday. It reminds me of a poem that I tried to write years ago. I wouldn't even know where to find the draft anymore, but I still remember the first line- the rest is just me playing.
I have been unpacking her for years.
Fragile and old, each china cup
must be dusted, and wrapped in
tissue paper tan and wrinkled
like her soft skin.
She is a found poem. Bunches of dried
lavender hydrangeas and waxy
jade magnolia leaves bundled
in the closet.
Even with the doors open the
house is musky with the
air of old movie stars, Chanel
and Virginia Slims.
In the black and white reel
she was running on
no one would come in six
months to see her out. She would
not sit quietly on the back steps,
smoking, in a sea of homeless things.
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1 comment:
Hiya Rachel, this poem has great sounds...cup and dusted, wrapped/wrinkled, bunches/bundled. And images...tissue paper, magnolia leaves, "old movie stars, Chanel / and Virginia Slims."
I like this idea of a person compared with things that are moved. We lug around stuff through our lives & moves, and with that come the people in our lives, past and present.
I might look to trim some of the adjectives. Not all of them, but I'd question whether some are necessary.
Do you mean musty instead of musky?
I like "In the black and white reel
she was running on" (esp. the tie back to the movie stars) but am confused how it continues into the next stanza. I think there's a leap in that last stanza I'm not quite following. Part of me wants a cohesion or parallelism...early on the woman is compared to objects, but by the end she is among the objects. Maybe I just need something more to help me transition. There's a lot packed into those last four lines, maybe it needs a little unraveling (though I love the last line imagistically [okay, that's not a word]).
There's a nice energy to the poem, a feeling of delicateness that mirrors all those wonderful, delicate images.
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