It’s true that I’ve been somewhere, though it happened only in a moment. I was at my parents' home in Chicago sitting in the yard. It was summer and I was twiddling my thumbs at the gates, watching the water from the hose, thinking of some great thing. There were two roads. One went east and one went south. We slept under a big oak tree and at night went to see a college. In the country there’s much land that nobody owns where you can picnic or even sleep. In the morning we bought apples. The land is remarkable there. We slept in a football field by a mill and when the workers stopped for lunch they walked in bands to a gas station across a yellowing road. We had fried chicken there. At night there were hills. My aunt lives there all by herself; her husband once shot a KKK man. It rained for three days and we stayed in a motel and watched rain sweep across the road. A creek ran behind a parking lot. We shot bottles there. A sheriff dropped us off by a reservoir. He said his wife had killed him. Before noon there were clouds and trucks with pine trees went down the road. Water was in the forest. Oil floated around trunks and the wind blew. The water spread out and boardwalks led into the trees. A kneeling barn sat stately in the water.
4 comments:
May I say when something is beautiful?
First thing I noticed is how good you are at diverse sentence structures which leads to a natural sounding rhythm. Even in the first few sentences you use differing amounts of clauses and wordiness.
I anticipate that you will give me the moment of "a moment" since that seems to be where it's going with you establishing a scene twiddling your thumbs. But with "we slept under" forward we have brief but disparate moments, and each on its town took you somewhere. It isn't immediately clear that you took the south bound road, and at first I thought you were still in Chicago since that's the moment used to situate the reader... Should it be? and If not, what's the justification for beginning at your parents' home? Also the way you have it reads as if it is one parent, just saying.
"water was in the forest" and "at night there were hills" are keepers.
wow I just realized my comment is at least as long if not longer than the poem. ... That there is compliment.
it reads like a check list of images and then all kinda builds into its own world. i like that it does that, how it's more than just "story;" it's a storyscape, alive and three dimensional and bigger than any of its parts combined.
This piece flows so much like a thought. I love how you've captured a thought of a moment in time. It moves independently. Lovely.
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