asepsis (revision)

[riverrun]

then one man will pursue the sea
to be drowned by his small span.
he'll dissect and persecute depths,
obsessed with whales and abysses,
hoping to find the X of cartesian charts
or reach the apex through his overcast
antithesis of moon eclipses and its
inherent ellipses or would be ellipsis,
these random waters without ulysses?

tomorrow he'll sigh at the same sight,
maybe amazed by those old symmetries
or perchance seized by some trinity
of primitive gods, discrete geometry
and concentric dreams.

he will eventually sing all known songs
for things to come at the ocean shore
and all misplaced hearts we must keep,
our dear and enduring plea of farewells
which overflows upon unexpected monsoons
along the perpetual motion of Heraclitus.

set sail old mariner!
let these words fail
beyond their failures.
where verses simply don't,
where our hands recoil
attached to empty spaces.

no more poems and stanzas.
this sailor will be forsaken,
gladly lost in his own songs.
this sea will retract itself,
undoing its waves without
sine, abyss and purposes.
but then a rose will bloom (out of blue)
without any warning.
what can we do against
this convenient sign,
against the original sin
of getaway from paradises?

[Poet]

Really good, but it was a bit complex for me to understand.

[CalebPerry]

I like the general tenor of the language, but I too find it confusing. You sound like you know what you're talking about, but I question whether you really want to be understood.

[jcnash]

Wow! This is an intense and impressive piece. I've read it through many times, I enjoy wilfully obscure poems, the sort of poems you can lose yourself in attempting to decipher them. There a few allusions I think may be there, but I'm not completely sure.

The language is beautifully constructed, I love the sibilance you've got going on, reflecting the sound of the sea.

I question the question mark at the end of S1 and I'm not sure about S2 L1, should that be 'he'll sight the same sight' or 'he'll sigh at the same sight'?

Other than that, I've no other criticisms. I'll continue reading it to see if I can uncover anything else, it almost reads like one of those ancient texts with hidden alchemical symbolism.

All the best,
barrett

[CalebPerry]

I enjoy wilfully obscure poems, the sort of poems you can lose yourself in attempting to decipher them.

There is your audience, Riverrun. I am completely the opposite. I don't want to work at understanding a poem. I want to be guided gently through the entire piece. I want to understand it the first time I read it as if I were reading prose.

[riverrun]

Hi Poet, Perry and Barret. Thank your for your comments first. About the "I question the question mark at the end of S1 and I'm not sure about S2 L1, should that be 'he'll sight the same sight' or 'he'll sigh at the same sight'?" it's indeed " he'll sigh" so thanks for the grammar checking... About the poetic apprehension there's a important book of Ivor A. Richards "Practical Criticism" who made of a wordplay a serious analitical work. The main idea of his book was to hid the famous poets names and the titles of their poems to be read by students. The outcome is amazing: most of time his students didn't like Emerson ("too obscure"), or Tagore ("too juvenile") and not only he established the concept of stock response (ie, our cultural background acting like a epistemological self defense system) among many other concepts but also how this stock responde fluctuates time to time. As if he would imply that reader X on December reading Emerson it's a completely different reader from Emerson on July. To me then the reader it's this unstable entity (don't know if between religion and science) and this is the beauty of interpretation. So to me it's not only about understand something or not but how our understanding and taste fluctuate too.

Best