DDCPoetry

 Some things I looked up when I read this poem again.  What is the name of a five line stanza?  First thought for me was Cinquian, but that's also the name of the poetic form.  This isn't a Cinquain in that sense.  Another word is quintain.  This is more apt. "Psalm."  Initially I thought "prayer," but I wanted to make sure and the definition is "hymn, or sacred song."  For me, the focus of the poem is spiritual -- about that in-between state between the actual and the memory; the here and the past. "Ignorance will carry me through the last days, / the blistering cities, over briny rivers / swarming with jellyfish [...]"  The speaker is confronting the last of their day, or perhaps all of humanity.  The imagery does go towards big encompassing images: cities blistering in the sun to a little more focus but just as big rivers, to a more enveloping image of jellyfish.  I think the last image is gambling that the reader feels consumed ...

  The Walking Man, Rodin The above image is what this eckphrastic poem is talking about. The poem takes on the physical features of the image in the first two lines, "But when the body stands here, one foot back, / one forward, the flesh flexed in motion,". Note how the alliteration in the second line, to me, adds a sense of movement to the reader -- where your eyes travel to -- those "flexed" moments. Again the poem refers back to the reader, "You forget your equivocating past / only to recall it the next second."  There's a sense of vagueness with these lines: what is there to recall?  What is there to equivocate on? "It is essential that he is headless / Admit it: you'd be staring at his face."  the headlessness of the artwork makes it stay an artwork.  When the speaker asks the reader to confess, they are asking them to acknowledge attraction on a human level, and an art level -- a kind of forced separation of the personal and the a...