On Donna de la Perrière's “Reaping Wheel”
It begins endlessly to occur that elegy is approaching.
Who is gone cannot be known, has from first stranger to next stranger, passed.
The poet looks to origin to understand but she cannot understand, even here—on the page, which is the site of the poem’s incidence— and there, a locus, a hometown where it turns out, she can’t return. “Reaping Wheel” evokes an erotics of absence, from it’s beginning where an “arrangement” is made that involves the poet looking and seeing that her stranger is “beautiful” from a “distance” but where she—by virtue of her own innate reticence—doesn’t “say anything.” In origin intention is always at least made of two—is it only that the poet won’t speak her love, or has she been ordered not to do so, by virtue of their arrangement? Or is it that third, ménage a trois, agreement by youth’s omission? Even in heaven, wounds are made, and the poet wants to heal the poem, herself, the stranger, with the right words but doesn’t: “I kept wanting to send it to you, but [] didn’t…” As a reaping wheel returns its harvest from the ground, memory returns its unforgettable moments only in the present, where love withheld can’t be given, where the past cannot be reconciled. The beloved is dead, and elegy must, as always, seek who is gone. “Reaping Wheel” is a cautionary tale, Shakespearian in it’s warning, i.e. “gather ye rosebuds while ye may!” Left in a perpetual “now, now” where she can but “wonder” that she “was not ready,” the harvest is reaped, and the erotics of absence are complete.
Who is gone cannot be known, has from first stranger to next stranger, passed.
The poet looks to origin to understand but she cannot understand, even here—on the page, which is the site of the poem’s incidence— and there, a locus, a hometown where it turns out, she can’t return. “Reaping Wheel” evokes an erotics of absence, from it’s beginning where an “arrangement” is made that involves the poet looking and seeing that her stranger is “beautiful” from a “distance” but where she—by virtue of her own innate reticence—doesn’t “say anything.” In origin intention is always at least made of two—is it only that the poet won’t speak her love, or has she been ordered not to do so, by virtue of their arrangement? Or is it that third, ménage a trois, agreement by youth’s omission? Even in heaven, wounds are made, and the poet wants to heal the poem, herself, the stranger, with the right words but doesn’t: “I kept wanting to send it to you, but [] didn’t…” As a reaping wheel returns its harvest from the ground, memory returns its unforgettable moments only in the present, where love withheld can’t be given, where the past cannot be reconciled. The beloved is dead, and elegy must, as always, seek who is gone. “Reaping Wheel” is a cautionary tale, Shakespearian in it’s warning, i.e. “gather ye rosebuds while ye may!” Left in a perpetual “now, now” where she can but “wonder” that she “was not ready,” the harvest is reaped, and the erotics of absence are complete.
Nearing Providence
I saw her
Step away from our body
Leaving me there on the wet ground.
She was stepping outside us
One leg at a time,
Taking me off with her pants.
Sweet Husk, Discrete Ghost
But it was me she was leaving
And it’s I who am a shade
The little boy drew tombstones engraved with writer’s names
“Shakespeer” “James Joyce”
And when he was a man
Slit his own throat
When our life was ending,
His mother picked weeds in my yard
Whispering at least he’s still alive
Pollen spreading across her palms
I’ve been taking off my pants
One leg one at a time
For more years now
See me lying there on the ground?
The boy’s mother is gone
A shade, I call for her across the weeds
On thee northern island
Where in providence
God is found
A man with a scar across his neck
Inscribes a funeral boat
Inside a golden bough
She is Carolingian
Home now in the desert
We step into the sea
Step away from our body
Leaving me there on the wet ground.
She was stepping outside us
One leg at a time,
Taking me off with her pants.
Sweet Husk, Discrete Ghost
But it was me she was leaving
And it’s I who am a shade
The little boy drew tombstones engraved with writer’s names
“Shakespeer” “James Joyce”
And when he was a man
Slit his own throat
When our life was ending,
His mother picked weeds in my yard
Whispering at least he’s still alive
Pollen spreading across her palms
I’ve been taking off my pants
One leg one at a time
For more years now
See me lying there on the ground?
The boy’s mother is gone
A shade, I call for her across the weeds
On thee northern island
Where in providence
God is found
A man with a scar across his neck
Inscribes a funeral boat
Inside a golden bough
She is Carolingian
Home now in the desert
We step into the sea