Been so busy lately that I have just about had my hands tied, and all this making up work is killing my back, but I am going to keep at it. Must do that catching up thing. Just remember as you read this that I love you tenderly like nobody else could ever love you.
David the Mathis:
Her Husband Died in a Train Attack
Not that trains attack like a savage heart out in the wild, stalking prey, because they don't--not normally, and even when they do, you never can tell when they're going to. They show no warning signs such as painful arms, or a swelling of the leg. Train attacks don't fill a person with premonitions of death for a week before they strike, or coordinate with other trains to optimize the attack vectors. For that matter, trains are generally quite docile and carry people inside themselves at great personal risk to transport those people from one area to another similar area, usually from one point on a landmass to another point on the very same landmass. They share nothing but exits and yet they're connected by a stream of people who walk out of one exit, into another exit to be taken to another place, but always the same door--only it leads to a different place.
Still though, on a day that was both sunny and windy, she heard the news from the radio before her family could call her, and the attack that she laughed about would later pester her into insomnia and wide-eyed she would stare at walls, she even still stares at walls with blackened eyes and a mind so withered that she says she can still remember the sound of steel as it bit the tunnel with ire to grind itself like a fourth of July sparkler, like a match, and struck itself flaming to kindle funeral pyres. She says she remembers the bodies, scattered like ashes over an ocean at sunset, gilded by the flame of a dying day. Maybe she does remember sitting in that seat and staring at the inside of a tunnel from behind a tiny window when the world ignited like the night sky with stars that arced themselves to form new constellations that she says are still etched into her vision which is why she can't drive. Or maybe she was never there and years of empathy have hurtled her mind through layers of time to arrive at the crash and her frail cortex never was meant to sustain such travel.
Or maybe, there was no train attack and she sits, crocheting her hours into loops and hooks until she crochets her memories of star-dappled tunnels and funeral pyres carried down rivers into net and catches herself like a spider catches a fly.
You have an interesting concept here and I'm wondering where you fished this up from? I'm glad you love me so much or I'd be force to kill you to figure out where you stole this--I kid. I do, though, love crazy old people. That aside, I also think you handled this relatively well. Not too heavy-handed, even tone. Nice.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I think this piece starts at the second stanza. You might have weird, if not, somewhat interesting things to say about trains, but whether a train attacks somewhat has little to do with the rest of the work. That's why I think you can start with, "On a day..." and changing the attack in the second line to include and become "train attack" so that we know what the speaker is referring to and so that we as readers can draw our own conclusions as to whether trains attack. I will relent that because of some of the interesting points you make in the first stanza, you can incorporate a small amount into the rest of the piece, but there is a point where you reach overkill on an idea and that first stanza as a whole does it.
I love the informative style this piece takes in contrast to the concrete images, but I feel some of the sentences could be condensed. For instance, "on a day that was both sunny and windy, she heard the news from the radio before her family could call her, and the attack that she laughed about would later pester her into insomnia and wide-eyed she would stare at walls" can become, "on a day that was both sunny and windy, she heard the news from the radio, and the train attack she laughed about would pester her into wide-eyed insomnia." I'm also debating whether we even need to know what kind of day it was...
Did her family actually serve a purpose in this piece? You go on to mention the walls later so is it ok to condense this part? There is a lot of repetition. Go ahead and cut some away, that way, each line does not get bogged down in unnecessary information.
I'm wary of funeral pyres. I'm only half-convinced. Seems... archaic in a sense? and heavy. Perhaps that's just me.
I like the negative progression of certainty here. She heard about it, maybe she heard about it, it might not have even happened.
All in all, enjoyable. Just do some condensing. Hope this helps.
Actually, it really does help a lot. Thank you for your critique. Actually, I'll tell you where this came from: It was a junkyard quote. Someone in class mentioned that in "story of an hour," that the protagonist's husband died in a train attack. She quickly corrected herself and said it was a train wreck, but the idea of a train attack stuck with me.
ReplyDeleteSo, the entire rest of the poem comes from that. Actually, it was also influenced by your class critique poem, so you can feel proud there. I just made up an event to talk about.