I Have Seen the Little Foxes

[PrinceMyshkin]

I have seen the little foxes'
eyes
gleam beside the path, signals
of a world collapsed on ours,
and I know I've taken that path
too far, when terror,
like a fist, thuds against my heart. Behind
is a wall as near as in front.

The night pours down, sudden
as a bath in a world
overturned, where gravity
holds nothing in its place.
Lovers, and jagged rocks,
and the familiar smell of the world,
all tumble together.

I whisper into unknown ears, "Love me!
I've kept everything for you--"
and draw back
to see fang-distended lips, eyes
filled with eager incomprehension.

Love waits in the dark.
The world that has collapsed
upon ours, its lung-walls
sighing hoarsely across each other,
random eye-gleams in the night, these
are suddenly all.

The stars doubt everything
you and I have begun.

[ReynardKitsune]

wow!1 its awesome i give it 9 out of a perfect 10

[Granny5]

It feels sad to me. But it is beautiful, Prince.

[AuntShecky]

Interesting content, but is there a rationale for the seemingly arbitrary line breaks?

[PrinceMyshkin]

Interesting content, but is there a rationale for the seemingly arbitrary line breaks?

I suppose your question really means that you don't see the rationale. Otherwise I can only answer either Yes, there is a rationale for each of the line breaks. Which in particular seem arbitrary to you? or No, I was just farting around.

[Sweets America]

How I love this poem! It is a masterpiece, each line sounds wonderful, the images are striking and the ending, wow, it is just perfect in its tragic tone.

[PrinceMyshkin]

How I love this poem! It is a masterpiece, each line sounds wonderful, the images are striking and the ending, wow, it is just perfect in its tragic tone.

As, I suspect, most people who have written poetry over the years will tell you, there are those you bust your balls over and they come out no better than kids who have been dressed up by fussy parents; and then there are those, like this one, that just seem to have written themselves.

Join me in Vancouver and I will show you the exact spot on Spanish Banks along the Burrard Inlet where this one was conceived.

[Countess]

I'm with Sweets. Wow - hit me upside the head why don't you. I understand what you are saying. I believe love is quiet and peaceful, and comes gently while you're floating down the river, appreciating things around you. This poem captures the flip-side of love, which is eager and torturous to the bearer of it. Question: is the delirium of love so great, that it overtakes the suffering of love? Edmund Burke disagreed, and I am wont to side with him in this matter: pain is more important than pleasure, and the absence of pain more desirable than the experience of pleasure.

[PrinceMyshkin]

I'm with Sweets. Wow - hit me upside the head why don't you. I understand what you are saying. I believe love is quiet and peaceful, and comes gently while you're floating down the river, appreciating things around you. This poem captures the flip-side of love, which is eager and torturous to the bearer of it. Question: is the delirium of love so great, that it overtakes the suffering of love? Edmund Burke disagreed, and I am wont to side with him in this matter: pain is more important than pleasure, and the absence of pain more desirable than the experience of pleasure.


How wrong you are! Let me count the ways.
When either pain or pleasure become “important”
they cease to have the primacy of raw sensation
without which we are like blind ones
who have learned to read by braille
in a world that is perfectly smooth!

They become instead functions of an ideology,
say romanticism or Christian suffering
or saintly ecstasy. Food is important;
shelter is important; defences against
brutal aggression are important;
but pain and pleasure are important only
as signposts to or from our desires....

[kiz_paws]

Well, I don't think I'll venture my ideas as to what you are actually saying, but I love the way you are saying it.... my favorite part was stanza two
The night pours down, sudden
as a bath in a world
overturned, where gravity
holds nothing in its place.
Lovers, and jagged rocks,
and the familiar smell of the world,
all tumble together.
and the ending was powerful, but who cares what the stars really think! We have only ourselves to answer for/to. [and hey, I am not trying to be a wiseguy, please understand]

I liked it, Prince. :)

[Sweets America]

Interesting comment, Kiz.:) That's true that we don't care about what the stars think :D , but this ending is so brillant to me. The whole poem is so brillant, I would be so proud to have written that. I love the imagery, the way the world is turned upside down, which echoes the way one can feel when love turns their life upside down and brings ache. I feel how the speaker is a prisoner of the events here, how it is too late to try and do anything:


I know I've taken that path
too far

And this image of the night pouring down! How great!! I love how the speaker just drowns in darkness, and how he is the helpless witness of his own inner turmoil, and I love how this inner turmoil is projected outside. How it cannot be contained inside of the speaker because it is too overwhelming. And this:


Behind
is a wall as near as in front.

conveys so well the idea of oppression, and how there seems to be no escape, no solution sometimes.

And this:


where gravity
holds nothing in its place.

makes me think of how love transforms our view of the world, how we look at things differently when we are in love, or when we lost love and nothing is ever the same again.

I love that line about the love which waits in the dark, unreachable. In the meantime here it seems that love is compared to those dangerous creatures lurking and waiting for an occasion to assault you. This is an interesting image of love and its consequences. And I love the contrast between the 'little foxes' (seems cute at first sight) and the 'fang-distended lips'. It echoes the idea of the world being turned upside down.

The last two lines, as I said, are among the best ones I have ever read. It bears so much sadness and emptiness.

Jer, you inspire me so much, you know.:)

[PrinceMyshkin]

Well, I don't think I'll venture my ideas as to what you are actually saying, but I love the way you are saying it....

Well, thank God one is not obliged to try to say in good old rational prose what one is trying to say at times in poetry and anyway, the way one says it is sometimes what one wants to say.

As Milton, out of his blindness, wrote of "darkness made visible," poetry can at times be the thing to make silence audible, or to approximate it.


my favorite part was stanza two
and the ending was powerful, but who cares what the stars really think! We have only ourselves to answer for/to.

Bravo! Bravo! - except we cannot help wondering what the stars think; we cannot help hoping for their approval...


[and hey, I am not trying to be a wiseguy, please understand] I wonder if you could be a wiseguy even if you tried!

I liked it, Prince. :)[/QUOTE]

[PrinceMyshkin]

Interesting comment, Kiz.:) That's true that we don't care about what the stars think :D , but this ending is so brillant to me. The whole poem is so brillant, I would be so proud to have written that. I love the imagery, the way the world is turned upside down, which echoes the way one can feel when love turns their life upside down and brings ache. I feel how the speaker is a prisoner of the events here, how it is too late to try and do anything:



And this image of the night pouring down! How great!! I love how the speaker just drowns in darkness, and how he is the helpless witness of his own inner turmoil, and I love how this inner turmoil is projected outside. How it cannot be contained inside of the speaker because it is too overwhelming. And this:



conveys so well the idea of oppression, and how there seems to be no escape, no solution sometimes.

And this:



makes me think of how love transforms our view of the world, how we look at things differently when we are in love, or when we lost love and nothing is ever the same again.

I love that line about the love which waits in the dark, unreachable. In the meantime here it seems that love is compared to those dangerous creatures lurking and waiting for an occasion to assault you. This is an interesting image of love and its consequences. And I love the contrast between the 'little foxes' (seems cute at first sight) and the 'fang-distended lips'. It echoes the idea of the world being turned upside down.

The last two lines, as I said, are among the best ones I have ever read. It bears so much sadness and emptiness.

Jer, you inspire me so much, you know.:)

Now, why did I have to go and fall in love with you long before reading this, when I would have done so on this alone? It helps, of course, that you appreciate my poem, but insofar as I can detach myself from my vanity, it's the intelligent, passionate way you express yourself that so moves me!

Oh, Sophie!

[Pendragon]

I could mimic Shakespeare and say "The fault, dear Jerry, lies not in the stars but in ourselves." but I would always wonder after all I've been through if that were absolute truth. The vision of the sky and night pouring down was vivid for me, especially. I seem to have felt it before. I also wonder if I have wandered too far on a nameless path. Your poem could have several interpretations, this being only one. Well done, mon ami!

[1n50mn14]

and I know I've taken that path
too far, when terror,
like a fist, thuds against my heart

This struck me where I didn't expect it to. I've no doubt of the personal involvement that you feel with this, and I feel my own sadness regarding this poem.

[PrinceMyshkin]

and I know I've taken that path
too far, when terror,
like a fist, thuds against my heart

This struck me where I didn't expect it to. I've no doubt of the personal involvement that you feel with this, and I feel my own sadness regarding this poem.

Isn’t that what we presume to do at times in our stories and poems, to ambush some place in our own hearts and possibly in that of our readers? Let me tell you a story:

During WWII, my friend Ruth and her younger sister Tamara were hiding as their parents had instructed them to in the ghetto in Shavleh, Lithuania. Their parents were off at work and a round-up of the ghetto children was expected that day. And soon Ruth heard the sounds of something, boots, orders barked in German, crying...

After a while this died down and Tamara, 4, began to be restless and Ruth, 6, judged that it was safe to come out. But she was mistaken. The last trucks were being loaded with the last of the children and a German officer came to round them up. But just then Ruth’s uncle, Wolf, was passing by and saw what was happening. He was a surgeon and had recently performed an operation on a Nazi officer. He went to see this man and pleaded for the life of his nieces. The officer said he could at best spare just one of them and Wolf chose Ruth...

Many years later I attended the naming ceremony for Ruth’s first grandchild. Ruth got up to address those who were assembled, which included her parents, and told them the above, and added (as closely as I recall): “I was the last one in my family to see my sister. After that, for forty years a silence descended on my family and though I am sure we all thought of Tamara, nobody spoke about her.

“Today it is time to welcome Tamara back into the family.”

The child was given the name Tamara...

I phoned Ruth later that day to tell her how moved I had been. She told me that after the ceremony she had gone with her parents to their house. “Papa cried,” she said, “for the first time since he received the news that Tamara had been taken, and so Mama cried as well.”

Didn’t she think that might happen after she spoke as she had?

“Yes,” she said, “but I couldn’t let Papa go to his grave” - he was quite ill at that time - “without giving him the opportunity to cry.”

[ampoule]

Your post above reminds me of Sophie's Choice. Oh my goodness. What a wonderful story you have shared with us, Prince. Thank you so much.
And your poem, I love it too....the part about the walls, like a rock and a hard place. Very meaningful.

[PrinceMyshkin]

Your post above reminds me of Sophie's Choice.

Yes, I thought that too when I first heard it from Ruth. It caused me some sickening speculation: Could Styron have heard their story, or might my friend Ruth's recollection of that distant event have been coloured by Styron's novel?

Ruth is one of those who are referred to as "Hidden Children" inasmuch as her parents arranged with a Christian family to take her in. There are more details, some of which are heartening, to her story, but I will mention just one that caused my hair to stand on end. There are annual conventions where these hidden children gather and as Ruth was about to head for one, she mentioned that one of the features of it is a large bulletin board where the survivors post messages re those they have lost in the hope that someone might know something of them. Ruth was contemplating posting such a message. "After all," she told me, "I don't know that she was murdered."

It was sometimes the case that Nazis would take a Jewish child, one whose memory might not yet be very strong, and place him or her with a childless German family who wanted a child of their own...


Oh my goodness. What a wonderful story you have shared with us, Prince. Thank you so much.
And your poem, I love it too....the part about the walls, like a rock and a hard place. Very meaningful.

Thank you, Ampoule.