Acute Amusement
by Bill Yarrow
Nostalgia is irrational. There's no good reason
why I miss rotary phones as I do. Or toll booths.
Or super 8 film. Or correction tape. Half dollars.
When I was ten years old, my father gave me
globules of mercury to play with. I used it to
shine nickels and quarters and Roosevelt dimes.
Endless fun dividing it with a stick and watching
it recombine, smashing it into droplets, squishing
it in my hand, the little silver bubble no longer
imprisoned in a thermometer but liberated to roll
anarchically over glass countertops and ash
floors. When I was tired of playing, I'd push the
blob into a test tube, put it in my top pocket.
The proximity of mercury is inductively comforting.
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Author's Note
This poem appears in WRENCH (erbacce-press, 2009)
The poem appears in Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX, 2012).
i played with mercury as a kid, too--nothing like it.
I never played with mercury, but I like the images in here a lot. Takes me to those moments.
A great opening here, Bill. The poem does rattle my childhood. I like this piece.
Gee, Bill, isn't mercury the stuff of mad Hatters? It doesn't seem to have done you any harm? or has it...? lol
Good one.
I like the look of this piece. Like others of yours, it has this 5 across by 8 down rectangular shape. Sort of like a prose paragraph switched from a wide format to a vertical one. So I'm thinking: are your line lengths cut at arbitray places to suit this shape? (Your last line here argues against that.) But then I'm thinking: is this, this property of shape, not one of the very essences of poetry? Shape as form. The visuality apart from the language.
On another matter, I notice you often lead up to, or build around, an aphorism or maxim. Sometimes as a three line coda. (Here it's one line, reinforced by the break in the line-length pattern.) But mainly your language is nice. To go with the shape.
Eamon,
Thanks for your interesting comments on "Acute Amusement."
My line breaks are not arbitrary, but I do play with whether I want the emphasis to fall on the last word of a line (as in Shakespeare) or to fall on the first word of a new line (as in Hopkins: for example, the line "like the ooze of oil /Crushed" from "God's Grandeur.") The second practice sometimes makes the poems feel more like prose paragraphs. Sometimes my line break decisions are based on metrics and syllable counts, other times on visual shape. I do like that 5 x 8 box you mention (at least much of my recent work is in that form). The boxy poems also work in (or against) the sonnet tradition being mostly 14 lines. I agree that shape is form and form feeds content.
re: aphorisms. Love to read and write aphorisms (follow me on Twitter for my own daily aphorisms) and I do include many in my poems. Excellent observation.
Appreciate your comments and you thoughtful response to my poems. Thanks!