Cloud comes

I don’t understand how people in the desert can live with such awful
openness: under the sun-sky all day, all the corners and hollows aired
out: skin withers.

Here, finally the cloud came—after almost a month of sun
unremittent, and every day going out to walk, to get the bus, to go to work,
and talk, and talk with other people: without the darkness, where the self
renews, self shrivels.

Sitting at the bus waiting, cloud comes. Out from under
the open eye of the sky, I felt like a cat belly-up sprawled in the shadow
cast between windows.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MaryLupin

I don’t understand how people in the desert can live with such awful
openness: under the sun-sky all day, all the corners and hollows aired
out: skin withers.

Here, finally the cloud came—after almost a month of sun
unremittent, and every day going out to walk, to get the bus, to go to work,
and talk, and talk with other people: without the darkness, where the self
renews, self shrivels.

Sitting at the bus waiting, cloud comes. Out from under
the open eye of the sky, I felt like a cat belly-up sprawled in the shadow
cast between windows.

---

Aside from the way this turns at the end, it is the unconventionality of it that is so appealing to me. I so like the idea of darkness as a source of renewal, rather than its usual fearful and sinister self.

I think the talky quality of this works better than in your other recent posting (the one on house demolition) in terms of walking a line between poetry and prose. When the language goes a bit more poetic, it trips me up, especially 'self shrivels', where, having already used the word self in the sentence, you could just have 'it shrivels'. Immediately after that, there's another repetition I'd bin. You've already said the cloud came finally. You could just refer to it as 'it' too and say where you were when 'it' came. After that, you let rip with some lovely lyricism that really seems to have a place, but the archly unconventional grammar of 'Sitting at the bus waiting, cloud comes' is stifling it for me. (What does 'at the bus' mean anyway? in? outside?)

Usually, I have trouble with this type of poetry, but this one sings its song well. Maybe because I love cats, my totem animal from my Native Anerican blood is a Cougar, and I relate to that image of the belly-up cat. And also maybe because we are currently have drought conditions. Or have found Cougar tracks... All I know is, I like it.

Pen

http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l1...s/Appaluse.gif

I liked it Mary. It has a serene tone and the cloud creates a mystery. I liked the opening stanza best:

Quote:

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I don’t understand how people in the desert can live with such awful
openness: under the sun-sky all day, all the corners and hollows aired
out: skin withers.

---

In fact I just noticed it opens with puzzlement and further seems to add to it as you go along, climaxing with the mysterious simile: "I felt like a cat belly-up sprawled in the shadow /cast between windows." I don't claim to understand it all, but it holds my interest and makes me want to penetrate, although one feels the difficulties. Enjoyable. :)

I liked the imagery and the thought behind this poem.
Some suggestions:
Break up the lines in some way to give the verse if not a formal meter, then some symmetry.

Would you consider deleting the "I can't understand" of the beginning line and begin with a rhetorical question:
"How can. . .. .(etc.)?"

And you have some subject/modifier disagreement that
I don't think you intended with this line:
"Sitting at the bus waiting, cloud comes"
The way it stands and the way it is punctuated, the sentence says that the cloud itself is waiting for the bus.

A really nice effort!

Auntie