Poem: No Climbing

[polkadot-cat.livejournal.com]

This is a much-edited incarnation of a draft I posted here a little while ago.  All comments and critique welcome!

No Climbing 

stepping through white branches, she was Cinderella
ascending a palace staircase.  she’d left her shoes
below, hanging on the “No Climbing” sign.
 
going higher, her red dress snagged,
caught on branches’ ghostly fingers.
lost to tearing, the fabric trailed her like blood, as if she’d been stabbed.
 
her head breached the tree’s great crown,
a baby whale gasping into toxic air.
a brief, perfect moment of silence
swallowed her before
 
her cells began to tug apart,
scrambling away from each other.
 
pulled up on invisible string
into a rushing void, her dissolving eyes cried
as her arms grained away like sand.
 
with feet kicking into a hungry nothing,
welling up between her molecules:
a new trust in signs.

Comments

[polkadot-cat.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much for this. I was actually pretty iffy about a lot of the language here (branch's ghostly fingers, for example), so thank you for your critique of that.

"is there a reason why Cinderella and No Climbing are capitalised where the rest of the poem is in lowercase?" It's just my personal style in poetry to generally not capitalize words other than proper nouns, titles (or signs, as in this case), and the word "I".

To be honest, objectively (or as objective as I can be), I don't see anything particularly clichéd about the "ascending a palace staircase", especially when that image/metaphor is juxtaposed against the action of climbing a tree. Can you tell me your reasoning for why you think it's clichéd?

I kind of agree about "ghostly fingers". I think I just like the sounds that are happening in that phrase more than anything. I guess I'll have to find a better image to put there.

"hmm, i get the imagery, but it's a little too narrative here, especially the "as if she'd been" part. perhaps try for a bold image and leave the connections to the reader's imagination?" Do to think, then, it would be a better idea to just leave out the "as if she'd been stabbed" altogether?

"hate to say this, but "void"'s a little cliched, and eyes can't cry.." Do you think a word like "vacuum" or "abyss" would work better? What is your suggestion? I just used void because it seemed appropriate. And also, is there anything really wrong with saying "eyes cried", since the word "cry" generally evokes imagery of the eyes? However, this is just my opinion.

I agree that the theme could be stronger here. This has been a hard piece to work with, and it's definitely not my best, but I'm enjoying working on it more than usual. I think I'm more caught up in the imagery than anything else, but because of that, the heart of the poem suffers. Anyway, thanks for the critique, and I'll definitely work more on this.