12 Replies to “Tanka”

  1. I wish I could say what this photo does for me, but at the moment I can’t (and I’m a little ticked off about it). I’m an enthralled ticket-holder, sitting on a mile-high stack of theater cushions with no way down but to topple.

  2. I liked the poem very much as well. I fell from my cushions to bed. One thing, on the side, that I liked about the poem was the strange impression I got of a bed as a nocturnal creature, going to sleep as you get up. I loved the passage to wakefulness, the vividness of the spatial situation. In one reading I you moved and stood looking down on your bed as you carelessly made it. There was magic in how you split from your sleep to arrive at a standing position and how came to look down from the present at the past tense of your sleep.

    1. Thanks for the close reading. I didn’t get all that out of the poem when it emerged from the keyboard, but you’re right, that’s definitely in there. Interesting that in allowing one ambiguity to thrive, I licensed another as well.

  3. Wow, I like the way RLC read it!

    Donald Finkel had this to say about beds:

    the beds never got up at all

    pampered in linens

    sprawling in perfumed chambers

    while on their breasts the gentry

    shrieked and sweated

    muffling from time to time a sigh

    in a diffident pillow

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