Singing in the hackle-pines

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Critical Analysis #2

Singing in the hackle-pines

ken_wertz
New Member

since 2007-03-22

Posts 6

0 posted 2007-03-22 09:08 AM

Sorry if this a bit long on first post here,

                    I

A bloom unseen is unsettling,
invidious to nothing, crying its
color out like a lost child.

Again I've returned, bewildered
when Spring turns home her sweet cheek,
slaps the last push of frost back from
trees, red-tinged on the horizon.

A girl I once knew had worn a trail with me
there, in those dark woods.  She had said,
"If ever you should hear singing in the
hackle-pine, in the manner of waters merging,
or know that in the boughs where the birds are
sleeping - that they are dreaming of flight,
then you will know the birth of something
chaotic in you."

                    II

Spring has brought back the raven,
whose black, cold eyes cry.  Where
now are those encomium faces of
preservation when a breeze can carry
the echoes of a wood being leveled,
but not its precious pollen out?
They have no self-burying bones for
the lack of prevenience in such a
piteous place, gasping in the earth.

Where now are those intellectual ears of
reasoning when the dark's draconian breath
is whispering, whispering, whispering
that I am still a child in the night?

                    III

A bloom unseen is unsettling, like the fresh
tracks outside a window in the morning, or a
howl in the absence of any discernable light.
It is not unlike the emptiness when a lover,
leaving, leaves her scent on an intimate thing.
And one cannot kiss the (thought) of ones cheek,
only the cheek itself.  There is beauty in chaos,
in the way that the stars shift in unforgiving
sweeps across the blackness that they keep, and
that keeps them, unimaginably and perfectly random,
or the way two thunderstorms collide with the
power less than that of a honeybee that strikes,
upending the lily's impurpled universe.

                    IV

Oh timeless raven - spring has come,
and still you occupy the sicker tree,
how is it that your myth is so mired
when so iridescent your outers refract
its sun?  Can you not be beautiful?

There is that proclivity to be content,
knowing in a broad sense that, somewhere,
something is loving something, like the
honeybee percussing the intercourse of
patterns on its way to some flight out,
unseen, and I should wish for such a
brutality upon myself.

Brad
Member Ascendant

since 1999-08-20

Posts 5705
Jejudo, South Korea

1 posted 2007-03-25 06:43 PM

How can an unseen bloom unsettle you? I can think of a few times when that might be true, I just don't see it expressed here.

It is very uneven and your use of 'chaotic', 'brutality', '(thought)' and a few other points strikes me that you are trying to unsettle the reader. No problem with that, but the same trick can also lead to a numbing effect.

It's an interesting start, however, I hope we see a second draft.

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