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the only real thing is the now,memories are in the past and we know not what tomorrow may bring

so live for today and forget tomorrow,for after midnite it becomes yesterday

'torpedoing sun'!

my response to your poem

https://www.postpoems.org/authors/saiom/poem/1100116

This is the most sorrowful poem, in my opinion, that Patriciajj has posted here.  The grief it conveys is both delicate and overwhelming; and my usual reading strategy for a Patrician poem is, in this poem, not applicable.  The cosmic voice, which is her customary sound, is absent.  The center of gravity, which is part of the customary structure of her poems, is either entirely absent, or to subtly concealed to be detected.  These are not flaws; these are the absences that come with grief over a loss, because grief is, by definition, about an absence---of joy, of contentment, of a loved one.  At the core of grief is always an absence; like, paradoxically, they say that at the core of most galaxies, those great swirls of cosmic light, there is a neutron star so dense that it steals, and never again releases, the light.  The absences in this poem are, paradoxically, indicators that the poem is an authentication of grief; and, as grief is about absence, so the poem must have absences in its structure.  And, as with most grief, there is a collision point---a point at which none of our emotional strategies for "getting by" will work; and at that point, the grief is at its most overwhelming.  I was surprised to see where she had hidden the collision point. and I will withhold disclosing what I believe its location is until I have reached my conclusion.

  Now, proceeding through the poem, we have a list in the second stanza---which, in showing us the process of grief, is snatched from us in the third stanza by a very subtle but also very ordinary phrase:  "You were always here."  Not, you are always here---like stars in the sky, like the oceans, like the comforts we choose for ourselves and expect to last through all of our needs; no, "You were always here," which in our common communications always implies the sad fact that, hey, you are not here now.  Another absence.  In the next stanza, we are introduced to the pillagers, the causers of grief, pillagers who have various identities for various grievers, but they all operate exactly the same way, by bringing about an absence (through wanton destruction, or casual disregard, or just plain boring apathy).

   In the fifth stanza, the poem's voice, which is not the Poet's cosmic voice, asks "Please don't take these."  How many of us have made that same plea, realizing, even as we speak it, that "these" (however we define them for ourselves) will be taken, and we will grieve for them, the plea will be ignored by the circumstances imposed upon us by the pillagers.  (I love how the Poet deploys these various sub-routines as part of the Poem's---or any of her Poems'---main process.  The metaphor of an intricately balanced and crafted clockwork, of words and phrases rather than of gears and springs, comes to mind; and I will try to keep this metaphor in mind for future poems of hers.)  

   In the remaining stanzas, we have more absences, beginning with the jay's knowledge that "there is nothing left but now."  Past and future are gone; the absence that grief mourns can even severe two of the three quantities of time.  The "jackbooted world closing in" means that some other aspect is being enclosed, as in buried, or closed out, as in exiled.  Another metaphor comes to mind, and I alluded to it a litte further above---the neutron star.  The neutron star, they tell me, achieves a density that becomes so heavy that its gravitation can restrain and cancel light itself.  And it does this by closing in upon itself.  A neutron star is relatively miniature---small potatoes on the cosmic scale---and yet, its density can drag the very light into itself, never to escape again.  And isn't that how grief feels?  The jackbooted world, closing in, closing upon itsef, closing out the good, the delicately beautiful, achieves a density so that the Poet's emotional light, which usually gives rise to her magnificent cosmic poems, cannot escape, within the confines of this poem; which is another absence; which is the quality of the grief that the poem expresses.  The Jay can see something that the poem's voice cannot; from the voice's perspective, another absence.  They sure are piling up, aren't they?  The last stanza tells us, "In perfect trust, she loves her life," and the implication of that resonates like a haunted, and haunting, echo in a great chasm or void---the implication that what the Jay has, perfect trust and love of life, has been taken from the poem's voice, which gives us the final two absences, and, in the Poet's great artistry, the two most painful, sorrowful, and unnegotiable absences, the final collision point, a coin of two sides, and either side is against us.  

   One of the most shocking literary experiences I ever had, in the summer of 1980 and again in the chilling months of January and February of 1981, was reading Nabokov's novel, Lolita.  And it was not the shock of the narrator, Humbert's, molestation of Lolita, or of the way he claws and crawls out of the cesspool of his own lust to realize, at the end of the narrative, that he had learned to love her, and to repent of what he had taken from her in ruining her adolescence.  Those are shocks, but they are not the supreme shock.  The supreme shock, in that novel, is that, as we read forward from the fictional preface written by the fictional editor, John Ray, Jr., we have known what Humbert never knew as he prepared the notes for his trial (which is the manuscript presented in the novel)---that Lolita is dead, dying in childbirth as she delivered a stillborn daughter, dead before Humbert's words begin first to debase her and then to exalt her.  It is one heckuva literary shock and one of the keenest effects of Nabakov's  literary skill.  So now, I am going to point out how Patriciajj achieves that same effect which, to my mind, places her on the same level as the great Nabokov, one of the few prose writers that I wil not stop reading.  SPOILER ALERT!

   Go back now to the first stanza.  The earth dreams of a devout forest and of the voice in the poem.  The Poem's voice has admitted its own insubstantiality, and by implication ours as well, and the devout forest's, as part of the earth's dream; which, in the grieving for all the absences which the poem gathers, is really an emotional nightmare.  And the Poet leads with that, in the way that Nabokov, with his sardonic humor, gives us a long extended narrative from a man who has a massive and fatal heart attack while awaiting trial, and the great lyrical exaltation of Lolita, at the novel's climax, is the exaltation of a ghost that now makes the whole novel a haunted landscape.  In constructing this poem of grief, and of absences that can never be recovered, the Poet causes the poem's voice to admit, at the very beginning, that this is a haunted dream.  This is the most poignant, most glaring, and most anti-existential absence among the absences that the poem delineates in expressing its grief.  It is the Absence, the dream ghost that has been lingering at the periphery of our sight from the moment we entered the poem, just as Lolita was already haunting the narrative of her cycle of degradation and exaltation.

   This has been the most challenging of Patricia's poems because it absents itself (another absence!) from my usual strategy of reading her other, more cosmic poems.  And none of this was obvious to me, as I began to read the poem, but the poem demanded that I work to understand it.  The death of Lolita, in Nabakov's novel, was not obvious to me, either:  I had to work my way to it and through it, just as I had to do so (in a way that was, to me, much more satisfying) in Patricia's latest Poetic Masterpiece.  But no matter how many poems of hers I get to read, no matter how familiar I can become with her artistry, I shall never reach a point where I am finished admiring her Poetic accomplishment.  In the presence of her Poetry, I will always be an appreciative reader; and the thought occurs to me that. when I pray today, I need to thank God for Patricia's poetic presence among us.