This is what happens when you criticize me-everything spins and expands and deepens. The helpful, honest critiques I received on the first version of this made all the difference to me. It may not be done yet, so please feel free to suggest changes. If you haven't tried openly asking for criticism yet, take a look at the original article to see what this process was like. It's worth being open to the honesty of your friends.
This is the original, and the revised version follows:
Can't Take a Picture
If my eyes had a shutter
Fast enough to process motion
It might be somehow easier
To express this unrelenting devotion
I feel the waves these many hours later
Broken shell bits moving under my toes
Layers of water flowing over and under
Too exquisite for ordinary prose
I've never written of water in the sea
I search for a title, one still image, but
Memory has movies that I can't freeze frame
So it spills through my head, unbroken lineage
The water holds me up in green-sun flavor
Then salts my lips when I rise
Sunlight on a math-born mirror dances
When I flip the briny hair out of my eyes
I study shape for I think it matters
But I can't hold a picture that lasts
Finally I cry out with the words I have:
I will float in the world until I pass
Can't Take a Picture
If my eyes had a shutter
Fast enough to process motion
It might be somehow easier
To express this liquid devotion
I feel the waves these many hours later
Broken shell bits moving under my toes
Layers of water flow over and under
Too exquisite for ordinary prose
I've never written of water in the sea
I search for a title, one still image,
But memory has movies that I cannot freeze
It spills through my head, unbroken lineage
The water holds me up in green-sun flavor
Then salts my lips when I rise
Sunlight on a math-born mirror dances
When I flip the briny hair out of my eyes
I study shape for I think it matters
But I can't hold a picture that lasts
Finally I cry out with the words I have:
I wish I could float on a word-made raft
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Comments: 19
Beryl--I wondered if anyone would comment on my changing the shape of the poem, and I'm not sure which I should use. I hope someone else will weigh in on that. Thank you both very much for your comments!
I have this idea. Kindly read it and then quietly throw it away. I thought that it helps the rhythm of the line:
It spills through my head (in) unbroken lineage.
Go well
Fred--I struggled with the rhythm of that line too, so I'm not sure what to say. I won't forget it, but will rather ask others to tell us what they think. I love it that you're willing to come and offer us this much honest input!
If I may point back to at least one other poem of yours, The Ultimate Metaverse, and to what was probably a private note about Theodor Schwenk's photography of the form-freedom of the liquid medium, I would venture to say that you are personally engaged in a struggle with the hard-formed-ness of contemporary late- or post-materialist culture.
In my comment there I misremembered what is correctly:
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things
We murder to dissect.
--Wordsworth, "The Tables Turned"
You want your reality to live, to flow; you want to be able to take it in as flow, live with it as flow, and share it as flow. It seems to be a capacity once held by human consciousnesses, then lost, and now to be regained if, for instance, we are to learn to co-architect nature flowingly, with all waste finding it paths into other useful living flows. Or build our own virtualities that are more than glittering carpets of ground glass.
To work in this territory isn't simple. I think you've experienced how our times tend to try to subdue and flatten and fracture the flow impulses. But I think you're winning.
Big graphic, uses Java.
The second verse in stanza three just doesn't feel right, but I can't really explain why. It seems like something I'd put in notes after the poem, if that makes any sense. I toyed with this a bit. You wrote 'I search for a title, one still image,'
My meager effort: 'My title, but the image in a wave'. or, "my title strains for an image from a wave', or 'My titles search made within a wave.' I could rewrite this line a thousands different ways. Hope this is useful.