Post by bluebird on Jan 7, 2019 19:24:17 GMT -5
I immediately located myself via WWII...bldgs. seemed more substantial than structures in Vietnam or Porto Rico. So, I started off in
the past, completely ignoring (or blocking out) the fact that the bombing of the World Trade Center was an actual act of war on our
own soil. So, my first adjustment re G's insight was that horrific battle is NOT a thing of the past but ongoing in an horrific way.
Introduction of "he" at first seemed Linda's "boyfriend" and probably a foreigner ("you Americans") though this "he" later developed
into a sinister character and so kind of sneaked up on me .
The leap to "our possum" seemed odd...but certainly made me think of playing dead to survive. Here the survival instinct takes
the form of being able to "maneuver" on "thin crust" of snow and stay close to the woods (the unconscious into which a victim
can escape?) or the world of memory or dream. Playing dead brought up (for me) the idea also of the underground, sleeper cells
etc. This depiction of victim working to survive is unsettling on so many levels.
Then it becomes clear that the possum is a "she" and even more importantly a "mother" responsible not only for herself but for
even more vulnerable lives.
I balked at Didelphis...it felt like a leap to Greek imagery that I didn't quite get. It did bring up the idea of laws and institutions though.
Why is the possum "our" marsupial? Our mother, our birth channel, our shelter, our virgin, our vagina, our Virginia ...which led me to
think of the state of Virginia and the South and at the same time think about virgin birth, of the virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven...
and a sense that a "he" had her, one way or the other,
but she "possessed of thirteen teats" immediately brought up the image of the original colonies and "our" republic...so now "he" might
have been God or some powerful archetypal/mythical masculine force who impregnated her (the mother who plays dead to survive)
and this pulls me back to the Judeo/Christian explanations of reality as the basis for "the place construed as yet-to-be-written- upon
by us...which brought up (for me) all the texts, laws, revelations and powers the the "he" rather than the mother, the playing dead
possum owns.
Then the poet comes back with the word "SWEET" ...back to thoughts of softness, pliability, back to the immaculateness of a virgin
female who will serve as a mother...so I re-think "sweet" as a guise to hide the power of the possum who licks a path from the birth
canal to a different hiding place. This for me is a powerful image and the poet also makes notes of the mother possum's act as
"resourceful" and "limber" or flexible...
So now I feel a certain call to the female of our species to begin to address the "yet to be written upon by us" consciousness,
experience and attitudes that respond to the fact that the female endures so much to bring life into form of any sort.
Sweet as an adjective is ironic because it refers to an identity that is really, like steel, strong. I think of Nancy Pelosi...of
how American politics feels designed to threaten the one who "licks the path" from the womb, the she who is most sensible
of the fact that there may indeed not be "enough milk" (including the milk of human kindness) in an overpopulated world and
then I myself leap to the idea that the "bringer-of-harm" or "cause" or "course" is a devil, a foreigner, a rapist, thug, drug
dealer, murderer or which the possum, the female who plays dead navigates around on the thin crust of the earth...and that
if "she" breaks through it, this "she" who is courageous enough at times to venture into daylight, into visibility, risk displaying
the terrifying possible possum truth that she also is fragile.
So, I feel this is not a poem of hope but rather a female perspective on what it means to be alive in an amoral universe. There
weren't any "cozy" places to crawl into in this poem...I see with Gerry's help how the line breaks create an uneasy and
precarious path though this subject matter.
As a poet, I found that this poem, with Gerry's comments on fractured lines and fractured poetry has opened up an entire
new possibility for writing for me and for this I am grateful and intend to practice this technique/form....so even if I'm way
off the mark in knowing what the poet was going for, I learned a lot from the work to make sense of it for myself.
the past, completely ignoring (or blocking out) the fact that the bombing of the World Trade Center was an actual act of war on our
own soil. So, my first adjustment re G's insight was that horrific battle is NOT a thing of the past but ongoing in an horrific way.
Introduction of "he" at first seemed Linda's "boyfriend" and probably a foreigner ("you Americans") though this "he" later developed
into a sinister character and so kind of sneaked up on me .
The leap to "our possum" seemed odd...but certainly made me think of playing dead to survive. Here the survival instinct takes
the form of being able to "maneuver" on "thin crust" of snow and stay close to the woods (the unconscious into which a victim
can escape?) or the world of memory or dream. Playing dead brought up (for me) the idea also of the underground, sleeper cells
etc. This depiction of victim working to survive is unsettling on so many levels.
Then it becomes clear that the possum is a "she" and even more importantly a "mother" responsible not only for herself but for
even more vulnerable lives.
I balked at Didelphis...it felt like a leap to Greek imagery that I didn't quite get. It did bring up the idea of laws and institutions though.
Why is the possum "our" marsupial? Our mother, our birth channel, our shelter, our virgin, our vagina, our Virginia ...which led me to
think of the state of Virginia and the South and at the same time think about virgin birth, of the virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven...
and a sense that a "he" had her, one way or the other,
but she "possessed of thirteen teats" immediately brought up the image of the original colonies and "our" republic...so now "he" might
have been God or some powerful archetypal/mythical masculine force who impregnated her (the mother who plays dead to survive)
and this pulls me back to the Judeo/Christian explanations of reality as the basis for "the place construed as yet-to-be-written- upon
by us...which brought up (for me) all the texts, laws, revelations and powers the the "he" rather than the mother, the playing dead
possum owns.
Then the poet comes back with the word "SWEET" ...back to thoughts of softness, pliability, back to the immaculateness of a virgin
female who will serve as a mother...so I re-think "sweet" as a guise to hide the power of the possum who licks a path from the birth
canal to a different hiding place. This for me is a powerful image and the poet also makes notes of the mother possum's act as
"resourceful" and "limber" or flexible...
So now I feel a certain call to the female of our species to begin to address the "yet to be written upon by us" consciousness,
experience and attitudes that respond to the fact that the female endures so much to bring life into form of any sort.
Sweet as an adjective is ironic because it refers to an identity that is really, like steel, strong. I think of Nancy Pelosi...of
how American politics feels designed to threaten the one who "licks the path" from the womb, the she who is most sensible
of the fact that there may indeed not be "enough milk" (including the milk of human kindness) in an overpopulated world and
then I myself leap to the idea that the "bringer-of-harm" or "cause" or "course" is a devil, a foreigner, a rapist, thug, drug
dealer, murderer or which the possum, the female who plays dead navigates around on the thin crust of the earth...and that
if "she" breaks through it, this "she" who is courageous enough at times to venture into daylight, into visibility, risk displaying
the terrifying possible possum truth that she also is fragile.
So, I feel this is not a poem of hope but rather a female perspective on what it means to be alive in an amoral universe. There
weren't any "cozy" places to crawl into in this poem...I see with Gerry's help how the line breaks create an uneasy and
precarious path though this subject matter.
As a poet, I found that this poem, with Gerry's comments on fractured lines and fractured poetry has opened up an entire
new possibility for writing for me and for this I am grateful and intend to practice this technique/form....so even if I'm way
off the mark in knowing what the poet was going for, I learned a lot from the work to make sense of it for myself.
