Silk Diamond
Silk diamond
September golden bullet
The leather horse
Rider
With bad news.
Bringer of news
Sealed in a scroll
Over the limit
Time sent
The dust devil.
Thirsty desperado
With a taste for murder
And blood
On his soul.
I will never cross the pass
By winter
The icy demon
Charms us all.
~~
George Sulzbach, 20--
[All rights reserved - used with permission]
George Sulzbach, Painting of the Lady. All rights reserved - used with permission.
George Sulzbach biography
So pleased to have one of my better paintings archived in a permanent area... I thank...
ReplyDeleteThe one and only "Painting of the Lady". 🙂
ReplyDeleteIt is indeed...
DeleteLovely poem and painting...
ReplyDeleteI thank you...
DeleteI wrote a "critique" of this poem when I blogged it, which may be helpful as a way into the poem:
ReplyDelete'First of all, I'll admit, SD would not have been included if it hadn't mentioned "September." But while referencing the month was necessary, it was hardly sufficient. I read over a dozen poems about "September" Saturday morning, and rejected all of them as being unsuitable for the context (where it appeared in the monthly archive)....
'It's very much in the Beat (or post-Beat) genre, of disjointed, swirling, "fragmented" images that so many people were writing (and so many were parodying) in the '70s and '80s, when I first got interested in poetry. As such, it fits with the selection that comes before it (today's), which is by a recognized Beat (but very light-hearted)....
Delete'Post-Beat poetry is very much written in what Northrop Frye calls the second stage of a lyric poet's evolution, the 'private language' phase; so I've got to admit that I had no idea what story and theme you intend; I had to closely read the poem myself and imagine my own....
Delete''Thanks to the picture you provided, the first line gave me no trouble: "Silk Diamond" is the speaker's pet name for his lady, whom he's addressing in the poem. The phrase I found harder to interpret was "September golden bullet" in the second line. I finally imagined a single yellow leaf blowing by fast in the wind, the first sign of the end of summer and the coming of winter....
ReplyDelete'That gave me a story: because winter's coming on, the speaker has to leave his lady, "Silk Diamond", because he has to "cross the pass" before winter. He has to leave her and cross the pass because of the "bad news"; there is a "desperado / With a taste for murder" loose in the land.
ReplyDelete'That in turn gave me two interpretations. On the first, he has to leave her to go and fight against the desperado; which reminded me of Richard Lovelace's "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars." On the second interpretation, "cross[ing] the pass" was an allegory, for dying: he's leaving her by dying, and the desperado is simply Death itself.
ReplyDelete'That last interpretation made it a great lead into Wilcox's poem about the "September of her Life," her good days being over and her death in front of her. It fit, in a way that no other poem did fit....
'As I say, I could have completely misunderstood your poem; that's a hazard of "private language" poetry. But most of your poetry is "private language". Which brings me to my last reason for including it. It is representative of your work; and while you already have two poems on the blog, neither are as representative. Adding SD gives a fairer picture of your work."
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