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…

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