Analysis of Iowa City: Early April
This morning a cat—bright orange—pawing at the one patch of new grass in the sand-and tanbark-colored leaves.
And last night the sapphire of the raccoon's eyes in the beam of the flashlight.
He was climbing a tree beside the house, trying to get onto the porch, I think, for a wad of oatmeal
Simmered in cider from the bottom of the pan we'd left out for the birds.
And earlier a burnished, somewhat dazed woodchuck, his coat gleaming with spring,
Loping toward his burrow in the roots of a tree among the drying winter's litter
Of old leaves on the floor of the woods, when I went out to get the New York Times.
And male cardinals whistling back and forth—sireeep, sreeep, sreeep—
Sets of three sweet full notes, weaving into and out of each other like the triplet rhymes in medieval poetry,
And the higher, purer notes of the tufted titmice among them,
High in the trees where they were catching what they could of the early sun.
And a doe and two yearlings, picking their way along the worrying path they'd made through the gully, their coats the color of the forest floor,
Stopped just at the roots of the great chestnut where the woodchuck's burrow was,
Froze, and the doe looked back over her shoulder at me for a long moment, and leapt forward,
Her young following, and bounded with that almost mincing precision in the landing of each hoof
Up the gully, over it, and out of sight. So that I remembered
Dreaming last night that a deer walked into the house while I was writing at the kitchen table,
Came in the glass door from the garden, looked at me with a stilled defiant terror, like a thing with no choices,
And, neck bobbing in that fragile-seeming, almost mechanical mix of arrest and liquid motion, came to the table
And snatched a slice of apple, and stood, and then quietened, and to my surprise did not leave again.
And those little captains, the chickadees, swift to the feeder and swift away.
And the squirrels with their smoke-plume tails trailing digging in the leaves to bury or find buried—
I'm told they don't remember where they put things, that it's an activity of incessant discovery—
Nuts, tree-fall proteins, whatever they forage from around the house of our leavings,
And the flameheaded woodpecker at the suet with his black-and-white ladderback elegant fierceness—
They take sunflower seeds and stash them in the rough ridges of the tree's bark
Where the beaks of the smoke-and-steel blue nuthatches can't quite get at them—
Though the nuthatches sometimes seem to get them as they con the trees methodically for spiders' eggs or some other overwintering insect's intricately packaged lump of futurity
Got from its body before the cold came on.
And the little bat in the kitchen lightwell—
When I climbed on a chair to remove the sheet of wimpled plastic and let it loose,
It flew straight into my face and I toppled to the floor, chair under me,
And it flared down the hall and did what seemed a frantic reconnoiter of the windowed, high-walled living room.
And lit on a brass firelog where it looked like a brown and ash
grey teenaged suede glove with Mephistophelean dreams,
And then, spurt of black sperm, up, out the window, and into the twilight woods.
All this life going on about my life, or living a life about all this life going on,
Being a creature, whatever my drama of the moment, at the edge of the raccoon's world—
He froze in my flashlight beam and looked down, no affect, just looked,
The ringtail curled and flared to make him look bigger and not to be messed with—
I was thinking he couldn't know how charming his comic-book robber's mask was to me,
That his experience of his being and mine of his and his of mine were things entirely apart,
Though there were between us, probably, energies of shrewd and respectful tact, based on curiosity and fear—
I knew about his talons whatever he knew about me—
And as for my experience of myself, it comes and goes, I'm not sure it's any one thing, as my experience of these creatures is not,
And I know I am often too far from it or too near, glad to be rid of it which is why it was such a happiness,
The bright orange of the cat, and the first pool of green grass-leaves in early April, and the birdsong—that orange and that green not colors you'd set next to one another in the human scheme.
And the crows' calls, even before you open your eyes, at sunup.
Scheme | A BCX XXX DEFX XXGXGHXHX X XEX AXFBI CXEXXXX IXXXEXXEXXX D |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1100111010101111100101101 01101001011001101 1110010101101110011110111 100101010101111101 01000101111111011 101110001101010101010 1111011011111110111 0110010101111 1111111001011110101010010100 001010110101011 10011101011110101 0010110101101010011110101101010101 111011011101101 1001111001011101100110 01100010111100100010111 10101010111111010 10111011010111110101010 100111010111101010101011110 01100110101010011010101011010 0101110010110110111101 01101001110100101 00101111110100011101110 11110101111111010010100100 1111101101010111010 001101011110111001 11101011001101011 101101011111111 10101111111101010001101111011100010111 11110010111 0010100101 1111011010111100111 111011101101011101 0111010111010010101011101 01101111110101 1111111 01111111010001011 11110101111100101111101 100101011010101011011 11011101110111 01101111110011111 11101101110110111111 11010011100111011101010001 110011100100110010111010001 11011101011011 0111010011110111111011110100111011 011111011111111111111111110100 011010100111111010100011100111101111101000101 0011100111011110 |
Characters | 4,392 |
Words | 826 |
Sentences | 13 |
Stanzas | 11 |
Stanza Lengths | 1, 3, 3, 4, 9, 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 1 |
Lines Amount | 48 |
Letters per line (avg) | 72 |
Words per line (avg) | 16 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 313 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 72 |
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Written on 1996
Submitted by Drone232 on April 14, 2022
Modified on April 27, 2023
- 4:13 min read
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"Iowa City: Early April" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 25 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/124841/iowa-city%3A-early-april>.
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