Douglas Cole reads his poem here
Drawn Down with Dark Fish
Night arrives with the tide
rolling in overhead
rising from the ground
so we walk over the black
spongy groves
and thick currents of ink
lifting us rooftop-high
among the fire particles
and the spinning blades
warning sirens going off
inside your head
as you lie a’bed
like an oyster with a shell
clapped tight
over your bit of dream
____________
Douglas Cole
Review by Jared Pearce
For me it’s that final image, that oyster with its shell, holding on to what will both be terrible, irritating, awful, and beautiful.
Review by Martha Zweig
Yes! to a poem that messes with me about what’s going on, especially with short, innocent everyday common words & line breaks that oops force me to doubletake on what I’d just made sense of.
Lots of ups and downs here. “Night arrives with the tide”: simultaneously/coincidentally? companions? Maybe night is a courier whose job is to deliver the tide? OK. Then line break: tide “rolling in overhead.” What? Are we underwater? Is night underwater too? Then, stranger still, what is rising from the ground? Suspense: I will have to read more, and repeatedly, to (try to) find out. Lots more interesting than Night arrives overhead with tide rolling in rising from the sand—and then, surprise, stanza 3 lifts us rooftop high among sparks, spinning blades and (stanza break) sirens only in ”your” head.
Who is/are we/us? “So we walk…” “So?” Therefore? In a similar manner? “We” and “üs” in lines 4 and 7 are reduced to just “ÿou” in line 11 and thereafter. Whatever happened to (unmentioned) “Ï”?
Commonplace narrative trope: It was all just a dream. Not so here. Warning sirens (The Odyssey): & the bed we’re in isn’t our own home safe comfy-cozy, it’s a clutch of mindless molluscs where the bit hurts as in the mouth of a jerked horse. Lines that sally forth a bit & stanzas that jerk them back again.
I do resist “ïnk” at the end of stanza 2: it makes me think of writers, but I do not want to go there. Maybe 3 squirts of squid ink?