10.17.14

Here's a little point-counterpoint fun. My last two "poem of the day" offerings confused me at first. I thought at first that I had gotten the same poem twice, when I glanced at the titles I confused them for each other. Here is the first



Holding Posture by Howard Altmann

History sits on a chair
in a room without windows.
Mornings it searches for a door,
afternoons it naps.
At the stroke of midnight,
it stretches its body and sighs.
It keeps time and loses time,
knows its place and doesn’t know its place.
Sometimes it considers the chair a step,
sometimes it believes the chair is not there.
To corners it never looks the same.
Under a full moon it holds its own.
History sits on a chair
in a room above our houses.



And the second. Not sure why I confused these, other than a glance at the capital H in the titles. 

A Home in the Country by James Allen Hall

Down on Comegys Road, two miles
from the Rifle Club that meets Wednesdays,
summer to fall, firing into a blackness
they call night but I know is a body,
in unpaved Kennedyville, not far
from the Bight, on five acres of green
organic farm, next to the algaed pond
that yields the best fishing in all of Kent County
(my neighbor says it is a lingering death I deal
the trout when he sees me throw the small
bodies back), down where the commonest
cars are tractors and hayfetchers, and men
wave as they pass, briefly bowing a gentleman’s
straw hat, you can find the wood cabin
where I live, infested with stink bugs. 
Every day, my boyfriend asks the murder count,
making light of my hatred. Even reading I sit,
swatter poised on the couch’s arm,
all the windows closed, fans off, the whole house
listening for the thwat of stink alighting
smartly on sun-warmed glass, their soft-backed
geometric carapaces calling to be stopped. 
I did not grow up like this, here
on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, but I am most
at home now I live with something inside to kill.


While I hadn't read these when I confused them, it turns out I may have had reason. Both read with a calm, measured voice, rolling the subject out in front of the reader. Both concern with the location and surroundings of the subject, albeit one literal and one figurative. I prefer the pacing of the first, because the sentences are a little more cropped and don't force you to be smart about your breath the way the second does. That being said, the initial long sentence with lots of clauses in A Home absolutely serve the piece, as they lead you down the road, past all the landmarks that lead you to the home.