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🦋 Form for an opening
Two short, untitled poems I wrote this week open the same way:
So he tells you
how her ears perked up
and she strained at the leash
as they walked beneath
the rustling maples.
He wondered
what the dog was sensing,
what presence unfelt by her master
the animal knew.
She shook her head and her collar jingled,
and they quickened their pace.
So he tells you
how she looked at the ice
hanging from the eaves of his house
and said it looked like daggers.
("like daggers" is not exactly right, that ending still needs some work.)
I'm kind of enchanted with this form, which seems like it would work for fiction as well -- It brings you into the past tense very naturally and sets up a framework of person -- narrator, reader, characters. The narrator here is identified as "he" and the reader as "you", and implicitly "I" am the author, prior to the shift of frame of reference that occurs on the second line; and there does not really need to be any mention of "him" or of "you" after this first clause, depending -- he can refer to himself in the first person and tell his story as "I", or I the author can keep referring to him in the third person.(Note I don't think this form would work with an omniscient 3rd-person perspective, which is something I have never tried.)
posted morning of Saturday, February 22nd, 2014
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alternately:
So he tells you
how she looked at the ice
hanging from the eaves of his house,
how they reminded her of daggers.
or:
hanging from the eaves of his house:
they reminded her of daggers.
i like the repetition of 'how' in the first, better, tho.
posted morning of February 26th, 2014 by cleek
Oh yeah -- that's good.
posted evening of February 27th, 2014 by J
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