Seasoned inductions Drifts-in with clenched brow a hovered frost clear. It stands for dark streets their catchments marketed cards sing. The stilled winter scene resigns to shadows effective what forbids we praise it that music to these ears it could not rinse in but elaborate for frames eloquence withstood. Now there’s no place to call as own beyond what scene depicts and this its shallow friends— solstice, snowman, if then birds— all un-cheered, outcried in solitary spring-fraught wish. A room to labor If comes prominence its course is run in lit remarks kept sleek these fastened nights that did. But the shorted feast clasps urge to rift and brings a heart entranced to levelled fields that mend that light as dusk bursts in and veers the gathering made to last-out careless breaths a ribald company shapes, sunk in soft knits crisp allotments show so that more, not less, should beat the heart to quick.
These are both pieces that celebrate moments of encounter. They attempt to show a cohesiveness that can arise out of random events or spontaneous milieus.
Seasoned inductions describes the randomness and chaos inherent in a winter scene and the profound effect on the viewer, in this instance regarding through well-ordered panes of glass. The spontaneity of a storm is met through the comfort of a home. A room to labor is a chronicling of events, if planned or spontaneous but in many ways haphazard, that arise out of an initially discomfiting office party. Again, it is the milieu that fashions encounter.
In both poems I have experimented with an ordering of lines that would indicate shifts in energy for the voice. The degree of rhyme, itself somewhat a manner of synchronization, is only to serve this purpose.
Andrew Cyril Macdonald considers the role of inter-subjectivity in poetic encounter. He celebrates the confrontations between self and Other and the challenges that occur in moments of injustice. He is founding editor of Version (9) Magazine, a poetry journal that implicates all things theoretic. You can find his words in such places as A Long Story Short, Blaze VOX, Cavity Magazine, Fevers of the Mind, Green Ink Poetry, Lothlorien, Nauseated Drive, ODD Magazine, Unlikely Stories and more. When not writing he is busy caring for seven rescued cats and teaching a next generation of poets.