Slim and smooth
as a teen-age boy,
With hands and lips
willful and deft,
He led me around
like a toy
Duck on a string . . . until
he left,
Taking a great
piece of my heart—
A double
defection and theft.
So I was left with
my art.
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Far and few of us was lucky in life to have experience this. Thank you. Well said.
ReplyDeleteAnother way in which the poem acts out its discourse is the fact that when "he" is removed from "heart," what is left is "art."
ReplyDeleteThis is an example of what I consider the purest and most intense kind of poem. The discourse, the statements, are acted out by the poem itself. On the level of statement, the poem briefly narrates a loss, and that loss is manifest in the form of the poem—the “defection and theft” are realized in the form itself, in the following manner: The poem leads one to expect an octave or double quatrain of eight-syllable verses. But it consists of only seven lines (It is defective—the eighth line is missing, has been taken away), and the seventh line has only seven syllables: "So I was left with my art.” (The missing eighth line might be something like ”Of everything else bereft.”)
ReplyDeleteAnother example of this level of poem is “To a Young Lover,” found elsewhere in this blog/anthology. There, the word “now” mutates from a simple temporal adverb to an urgent incitement to sexual intercourse, while performing mutations of two of John Keats’s most nearly perfect poems.