In this theory
I come slowly
to Venus.
It’s hard to look
at a full moon,
so explain that it
was already formed
in the 1970s.
What we now know
as the moon
collected other bodies.
Specifically,
these words:
the sun is only
your first oath.
Tags: caroline crew, poems, poetry
(!) I like this. Publicly discussing poetry is weirdly difficult, though, so you know: saying anything else is hard.
… gnaaar, okay, I re-read it a bunch! I love the imagery but the line breaks trouble me, because I feel like they’re there to make the poem (as someone once yelled at me, in a fury, so perhaps this is just projection) there to make it “feel” poem-y, where it is clearly a beautiful set of pictures already.
Perhaps a few fewer line breaks, to make the images hang together, unless there is a structural reason for them which I am missing. Which is always possible. Canadian sorries, bowing out.
I was recently side-moted to sci-fi editor and now spend all my time reading about, exploring, or watching terrifying movies about cosmic bodies of all kinds, so I pressed this poem close to my face and tried to inhale it.
Whaaaaattt?! One of my favorite people, here on the Toast! We miss you and your poems in GA, darling. Those last two lines kill me. Love.
Whaaaaattt?! One of my favorite people, here on the Toast! We miss you and your poems in GA, darling. Those last two lines kill me. Love.
Wow, okay—where to begin? In the Browning, “The first time that the sun rose on thine oath / To love me…”; in this poem, “The sun is only / your first oath.” Oaths and suns are closer, then (just as theories are to Venus?)–that is, on the same spatial plane; where the sun seems to rise parallel to the oath in the Browning, here, the sun IS itself an oath. And further, “only” and “first” connote a new kind of smallness; the space between the sun and (what comes to be known as) the moon contains room—room for other bodies? And another conflation in “bodies”… I have open the Wikipedia tab for “Sample return missions,” and I’m reading the line, “Up to the present, humanity has collected samples of six identified Solar System bodies as well as samples of the solar wind.” Another step in the strange materialization throughout… But then, too, the bodies that might populate the decline of a relationship. What to make of the 70s? An age-old question.
I love it! Also: “samples of the solar wind”: somebody make that a title of something.
I love it! “Samples of the solar wind”! Your review of this lovely little poem is wonderful. “the sun is only your first oath” could be alluding to the infinite vastness of the universe?