The Distances

[Gene van Troyer]

I see the changing in our distances,
of winter differences, encroaching snow:
there great abandon takes us,
deserts us like a momentary wind
lost in starry deep immensities.

In distance like a mirror we are tied
and what’s between us we are not
until we touch, and see our watermarks
in surface tensions taut in other eyes.
We seek our linkages

and finding them are born
and know our tragedy—
the broken chains and lives, lost relationships
like wind beneath the sightless stars
defining distances.

The linkage snaps, corroding with the flesh.
Windy distance takes it all inertial;
spent, we fall away through mute whiteness,
begin again. But each beginning
tills the earth for each end.

Small things warned us, in their way.
We might have seen their hint,
how nature works in its progressions
to gift us with its seal: inevitability.
And again, again: Begin again.

[barrie]

I liked the sounds of the first verse but I think it would sound better without starry - I can see why you've used it (deserts us, lost), but it flows better without it.

The only verse I have a problem with is the penultimate one. I lost your train of thought here, the corroding with the flesh and wondering what you meant by Windy distance takes it all inertial. - But each beginning/tills the earth for each end. sounds a little odd to me. Tills the earth for?

It comes back together in the last verse - but is it strong enough? Is it as strong as the one you led in with?

Just a few thoughts.

Barrie

[Elphin]

Gene

It would be easy for me just to pass this by, but we are all here for feedback so I have to say I just found it too difficult to pull this together into a coherent image or message or to get a sense of the Narrators emotions.

The last stanza does pull it all together and almost spells out the message and its a premise I do like and appreciate. And I really wanted to like the whole piece because the phrasing and the word choice in the first two lines grabbed me (other bits too e.g. the watermarks). But then it became a bit too "poemy" for my taste e.g. a momentary wind/lost in starry deep immensities and convoluted too in the middle stanzas.

It may just be my laziness and not being prepared to work at the poem - sorry this time, Gene.

Elphin

[dogofdiogenes]

Gene,

I quite enjoyed this. i completely agree with barrie about 'starry' and although it is a good first verse, the rest doesn't quite have the intensity for me that the first offers. I think it is also a shame that you don't make more use of your wind (metaphor?). Is the fourth verse about growing older, growing apart with difference and growing back again?

dozzydog

[Gene van Troyer]

Thanks Barrie, Elphin, and dog. If it requires explaining, then it hasn't done it's job in the first place, so I have some things to think about here. Overall, it's a generational piece, growth, death, rebirth; and individual, in that relationships fall apart and people start new ones that also fall apart. No matter what you do, you're going to lose it.

So. Back to the notepads and head scratching with this one.

[oranggunung]

Gene

I can see the references to the relationships here, but the language makes this a very downbeat piece imo:

desert
lost
tragedy
broken
corroding
spent
tills the earth
seal

- all these images have negative connotations. To me it makes the narrator sound embittered or cynical or fatalist. That only serves to distance me from the poem. Is it supposed to be so bleak?


og

[Gene van Troyer]

It is supposed to be very bleak. It is actually a poem imbedded as a plot device in an as yet unpublished science fiction novelette, composed by one of two starship pilots who have been plugged into an AI system for 15 years. One pilot is human, the other is a construct created to keep the human from going insane—but of course the human learns it is all a fiction when the starship makes orbit at the destination world. The construct has subconsciously written the poem and it is leaking into the human's consciousness.

[dedalus]

One pilot is human, the other is a construct created to keep the human from going insane

Substitute 'teacher' for 'pilot' and it sounds like an ordinary Thursday afternoon at the school .... that said, I am getting a better grasp on the poem through an understanding of the context. But ... what's with the encroaching snow?
-- Bren

[Gene van Troyer]

"Teacher" for "pilot?" Lord love the man for holding in his hands the tender minds of young Japanese students (not unlike yours truly, though mine have left high school—not that it's easy to tell, in Japan ).

"Encroaching snow?" That is perhaps me trying to find down-to-earth imagery to replace more abstract astronomical terminology and/or other language intended to describe the universe as observed from a starship moving at 99% light speed.

Ahem. As I said, if it must be explained like this, the poem has failed. Even if it works when embedded in a larger context but loses something when excised from that context, it fails at least as a stand-alone effort.