Today's poem

My inquisitive interest has been space in line for a long time. Each time I attend a workshop, I have asked about the meaning of individual space in a poem. I remember that white space is critical as well as black space as a comment of a poet and tutor in the workshop of A Casa dos Poetas in Portugal. In this viewpoint, I choose the poem. An American poet Linda Gregerson has written poems in a sinuous tercet form that is a formal vehicle for her. Every stanza is a left-justified block with an indented line called a “pivot line” by her. Of course, the meaning of space is varied depending on poets and poems.

I like her poems based on her thoroughgoing research.

Eyes Like Leeks by Linda Gregerson

It had almost nothing to do with sex.

                      The boy

               in his corset and farthingale, his head-

voice and his smooth-for-the-duration chin

                      was not

               and never had been simply in our pay. Or

was it some lost logic the regional accent

                      restores?

               A young Welsh actor may play a reluctant

laborer playing Thisby botching

                      similes

               and stop our hearts with wonder. My young friend

he’s seven—touched his mother’s face last night

                      and said It’s

               wet and, making the connection he has had

to learn by rote, You’re sad.

                      It’s never

               not like this for him. As if,

the adolescents mouth wherever California spills

                      its luminous

               vernacular. As if, until

the gesture holds, or passes. Let’s just

                      say

               we’ll live here for a while. O

habitus. O wall. O moon. For my young

                      friend

               it’s never not some labored

simulacrum, every tone of voice, each

                      give, each

               take is wrested from an unrelenting social

dark. There’s so much dark to go around (how

                      odd

               to be this and no other and, like all

the others, marked for death), it’s a wonder

                      we pass

               for locals at all. Take Thisby for instance:

minutes ago she was fretting for lack of a beard

                      and now

               she weeps for a lover slain by a minute’s

misreading. Reader, it’s

                      sharp

               as the lion’s tooth. Who takes

the weeping away now takes delight as well,

                      which feels

               for all the world like honest

work. They’ve never worked with mind before,

                      the rich

               man says. But moonlight says, With flesh.