April 4, 2006: Part of Eve’s Discussion, Marie Howe
Part of Eve’s Discussion
Marie Howe
It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment when rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
all the time.
[Good similes are really difficult and really wonderful when they’re
on, and I like the way all these snapshots of emotion build to create
a feeling of impending — and then continuing — awfulness. I also
love when the title of a poem adds something to how you read it; like
here, where it makes the poem be about what life must have been like
after the Fall, when Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden,
finding the human emotion in old stories. And then how it works on a
different, more everyday level, as a description of life after any
terrible event.]
A YEAR AGO TODAY: i thank You God for most this amazing, e.e. cummings
