The Nasty Pink of Sunrise
Posted on 20 December 2009
Why did you do it,
what advantage was there to it
for you wearing down like glass
this marching toy
of quivering, flowering
confusion of radishes
me?
This is the journey, Alice
or walk away to a sofa
to lie on pillows
and bury the roots
away.
Even dead, though,
marks will appear
on the forehead
and our progeny
will jiggle on strings
with clanging cans
for shoes.
I believe this was
to be an iron clad
agreement.
And maybe it’s too late
and maybe this is not
a new problem,
but why not gather
our wits anyway?
What’s left to lose?
2 responses to The Nasty Pink of Sunrise
Difficult only for a foreigner like me?
Two questions: 1) Is Alice the one in Wonderland where there was a “pink sunrise” that I don’t recall?
2) What does “for you wearing down like glass” mean.
And an extra comment; the “radishes” were also hard to swallow.
Herman
Hello there, Herman — HAPPY NEW YEAR.
I’ll be intrigued by your thoughts on what Michael wrote, thanks to your intervention “Thomas Hobbs, Redux and then some” (today’s entry).
I don’t know the answer to your first question re Alice.
And, I guess, wearing down like glass is about starting with a “toy” of something quivering, alive, complex and yes, perhaps even hard to swallow — but three dimensional — now it has been worn down to something flat (almost two dimensional)and can be seen through ie– has no quality of its own anymore. Not a good thing, I’d say.
But I think the poem ends with a strategy for escaping a relationship like this (this poem is about relationship), a relationship where a person is squashed.
And then, hopefully, there’s just the strange music of the thing. At its core, a poem must be about it’s “music,” I think…