Mi Sueño
Mi sueño, you think I don’t know you,
the scar bright, the piercing surprise
but I do, as I know blue diamond-dust rain
sparking on the amber candles of crucifers,
as I'm skinned by the one atom of brain
that guides the devouring mandible
or your bells of lips, your aluminum eyes,
rouged with the fever of Lucifer.
I know each black strand of the pile
you crosscut for the velvet mask;
I wove it myself, wore it myself
in autumn moon and blood, to hide, to show
only the wells from which we drink. I think
you don't know me, my dream, but you do.
~July 2013
posted for real toads
Sunday Mini Challenge: The Sonneteers
Kerry O'Connor has managed to penetrate the fog I've been in of late with her examination of two poets born in July, Petrarch and Neruda, who excelled in their own interpretations of the sonnet form. Despite the rough rhyme and stanza breaks, I doubt whether this is really any kind of sonnet, but many thanks to Kerry, and to the poets who responded to this challenge, for inspiring me to write when I thought I couldn't.
Image: Cauldron Of The Sorceress, by Odilon Redon, 1879
Public Domain, via wikipaintings.org
Hmm... Beautiful and I will have come back and see how others interpreted this as I am not sure I am reading it correctly. But it is enchanting, you just excel at alliteration - everything you pen just rolls off the tongue.
ReplyDeleteI am most gratified to know that you found inspiration enough to write today. Whatever the source or how it came to be, this poem has a force to it. You never fear to look in a mirror to see the darker side of personality - the masks constructed by self to hide self. And as a sonnet-type poem, I think this shows what may happen when 7 centuries of experimentation with form meet a poet willing to take it to another level yet. It is formidable.
ReplyDeleteThere is obviously a lot of depth of meaning in this. My first thought (inspired by the picture I think) was that you were being eaten by an alligator. But then I see you are also talking about your own mask. Some wonderful word paintings here.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me a little bit of that old Billy Joel song "The Stranger." The speaker in this poem and the dream would like to pretend they don't know each other, but, oh, they do, something like the famous image of the snake that consumes itself. Does one hand know what the other one is doing here? I think they do. Oh yes. They do.
ReplyDeleteLord, lady! If this is the result, pass me some of that fog!
ReplyDeleteLoving the song playing inside your head on the side bar!!!
ReplyDeleteDedicated to my bff's alter ego, who has been sorely missed.I just wish I could make it play LOUDER. ;_)
Deleteits a wicked dance between us and our dreams...and we can pretend we dont know each other and that the mask is secure but, oh we do...smiles...good to see you ma'am...i am glad you are feeling well enough to write...smiles.
ReplyDeleteI am laughing at MZ's comment, though of course, the poem has little to laugh about. What it reminds me of--or I should say, what I get from it - has as much to do with a kind of agony of creation as well as dream. This is because the images have a very churchified feel to me - but in the ritualistic Catholic sense and they bring up both Paradise Lost and "His Dark Materials" by Phillip Pullman, which is oddly a children's book saga based on Paradise Lost - (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass--great books) - but in those books (which I'm pretty sure you haven't read) - dust is a metaphor for original sin but also for originality - and lust and passion and knowledge of good and evil and a lot of good stuff-- as well I suppose as quintessential decay and base elements - -and here the dust sparking from the crucifer's amber candle feels like that - the amber has a petrified quality as well as color - and everything is somehow caught mid-identity - the mask too --something worn both by executioner and the person executed - all of this back and forth between the creator and the created, the dreamer and the dream, God and Lucifer - but of course, we are each sort of the Gods of our dreams as our dreams are the rebellious Lucifers of our orderly mental heavens. (Well, I'm guessing other people's are orderly!) A very strong Neruda/esque latin feel to this - though I felt that maybe you used a bit of Petrarchan form. (Or more than a bit.)
ReplyDeleteIt's a lovely challenge. I have a lot of work to do jobwise so don't know if I can manage, or if so , very late. But so glad to have read yours and the others I saw. K> ps glad you are feeling better.
PS - went back and looked at the rhyme and I think it qualifies! I like slant rhyme anyway - I think that things can get awfully pat otherwise. I have checked some of Neruda's in Spanish where they do rhyme. I understand Kerry's point - which is a great one, and I also understand why the translators have forgone the rhyme, but I do think a little bit of slant is kind of nice. There is something so very musical in the form, which is definitely heard in yours too. k.
ReplyDeleteThanks, k--yes, I think sonnets need some sort of balancing act, in rhyme or cadence--when I first tried writing one I absolutely abhorred the form because it made me work so hard, but I kept trying because I am pigheaded that way, and also because I so admired what people did with them--now while I would not say I'm fluent in any way with the form, especially the really tight versions, I do feel like I no longer spoil the purpose of the dance by counting each beat/step out loud, as it were, instead of dancing.
DeleteI love your view of the poem(no, I haven't read the Pullman books, though the titles remind me a bit of CS Lewis's Out of The Silent Planet trilogy, which I have.) I often find myself using the symbols of Christianity pretty much the way I lean on myth--in many ways, it is the mythology of our own times and culture, and just as rich in all the symbols and code that we depend on to decipher and make meaningful the mysterious universe.
It was indeed a wonderful challenge, and I hope you're able to do something for it when time and work allow.
Well, came back (and LOVED the Elton tune, thank you. downloading THAT to my iTunes to exercise with. I am embarrassed to say I have never heard this song before! So glad I came back. ... Elton John was a light blond?
ReplyDeleteand the poem... yes, we do try to hide from ourselves, but it doesn't work very well, does it?
Elton John was anything he wanted to be, I think. ;_) Glad you enjoyed the song, it's one of my favorites of his later work.
DeleteAnd no, no it really doesn't.Thanks, Margaret.
You doubt what you write, then I should quake in my shoes at what I created. This is gorgeous...It so fits the challenge superbly.
ReplyDeleteI am happy to see you are back writing. I love your voice in this sonnet, which I read as courageous and self-assured. The volta says much, owns it and then turns it back around on itself in the end. really wonderful, Hedge.
ReplyDeleteHad to google sueño, and then it fell into place. The dreamy and the picture. Gorgeous images you paint Especially in the first two stanzas.
ReplyDeleteGreat poem
i like the near-rhyme here, the whole thing is just very subtle and wondrous.
ReplyDeleteYour third stanza...wow...those strands of the pile...velvet and the wells...there're so many rich pieces of this that together create such a vivid and slightly scary poe-m. Very much enjoyed, Hedge!
ReplyDeletefelt hallucinatory to me, and lit by flickering torches, HW. ~ M
ReplyDeleteThen my work here is done. ;_)
DeleteThis challenge would not have been complete without your poetry ... truly amazing ... textured, layer after layer. Wondering now ~ am I me or my mask.
ReplyDeleteMoonbat...
ReplyDeleteYou have so much to say in terms of Poetic Majesty, that I'm sure that no one cares about form. Especially 14 of iambic pentameter, that in itself sounds Diabolical!!
You have Dispensation in regards to conforming to form.
Thus sayeth The Lord.
Go and Sin some more....
I hear and obey, Master. Thanks, G.
DeleteThere's not much I can add to these comments (and besides, Mama Zen said it best), but the question: does the dream make us, or do we make the dream? The answer is both, I suspect.
ReplyDeleteAnother one of those existential variables--perhaps it depends on the dream, which in turn, depends on the dreamer? Thanks, Mark, for reading.
DeleteVery intense and well written.
ReplyDeleteMadeleine Begun Kane
the picture pulled me in and the creature threw me out but Jimi is till playing so I made the most of this beast and it is a monster too . . .
ReplyDeletea deep plunging narrative that I can relate to and empathise with in a wicked mind split shift of multiplicity. Man poetry IS the food of the soul isn't it? at least it fools me into thinking I have one . . .
it wont last but it DID happen :)
cheers hedge
Man - poetry IS TFOTS instead of 'Man poetry' that would be weirdly sexist as a consequence of poor punctuation :D
DeleteYou have no idea how hilariously I'm picturing 'man poetry' atm lots of rhyming bodily noises, mostly.
DeleteThe soul, el alma es el sueno es el corazon, mi amigo...lo tienos todo.