You Fell at Night,
and by the time i found you
the sun had dried up everything
but your soft petals
in a heap on the patio
with the broken glass
no one heard,
no one must have looked
out the window to you
or else you would have been
swept up and thrown out
or recollected and replaced
on display, and i would
never notice until someone came home
from work to tell me
what i'd missed
but i found you, and came to you
and in the chill air the sun
felt good on my goosebumps
while i gathered you into my hand
and shook the glass from your stems
and carried you in while you cried
petals all over the carpet,
all the way to the sink
where i put you in
a tall glass of water
and when i carried you back
to your place on the patio
careful not to spill
and gathered up your petals
from the floor to the sink
i only had a little trouble
washing them down
the garbage disposal
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
You Fell at Night
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3 comments:
"but i found you, and came to you
and in the chill air the sun
felt good on my goosebumps"
"(...)gathered up your petals
from the floor to the sink
i only had a little trouble
washing them down
the garbage disposal"
Those two bits are excellent. They leave behind a distinct mood like a pleasant dream. I suggest editing this down around those two pieces, streamlining to only what needs to be said.
I would be particularly careful with this though:
"no one heard,
no one must have looked
out the window to you
or else you would have been
swept up and thrown out
or recollected and replaced
on display, and i would
never notice until someone came home
from work to tell me
what i'd missed"
There's something there as well that I think should be said but needs to be left ambiguous like a dream as well, like shattered glass and a volume of water without specificity running over the floor...that's as near as I can come to explaining the strange impact of that sort of event anyway.
Great concept.
You use a large number of conjunctions, though, particularly at the beginning of lines. That lends itself to your semi-rambling, cascading style, but it also creates issues with syntax and causes confusion. For example, the 'but' of "but your soft petals" in the first stanza initially threw me off.
And while the conjunctions add a 'flowing' element to the poem, they kind of turn it into a monotonous drone, in my opinion. It feels like too much is diluted by the fact that stanzas consist of single sentences, most without a break or a pause.
So, yeah. I think you just need to cut out a couple of the and's, or's, and but's, maybe even move them to the end of the previous line.
Good stuff, though.
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