posted message: [3rd part] I know that "clouds robe the fog" has a secret meaning I've not yet found. Maybe someone here will see a possibility. I was particularly happy to find that "gull" image because it so aptly represents for me that strangeness of the "Gulls replace the stars . . ." phrase, gulls being often considered ugly/noisy birds compared to beautiful/remote stars. The final sentence sends me into a transport. Is it that trains fill [with people] in the harbor or that trains fill [all the space] in the harbor [where water was & boats might have been]? Each time I read the poem it keeps opening up to me. Which is not to say that the poet meant everything that I see & hear, but simply that the art he created, the poem, does these things to me.

posted message: [2nd part] Odd phrases in the poem began to make me look for correspondences, such as the mumbled water / messy warbles one I found first. A worked a long time before I saw that scoots -> closer might be reduced to "scoter," which is a common sea bird (depicted in my slide show) & scoter creates the connection to "otter" at the end of that curious sentence about a family. Similarly, the children becoming "interns" led me directly to "inland" & less directly to "this ghost I have all over my arms," a tattoo image that led me to the possibility that one internship for the children would have been as a tattooed lady. The wind -> boat-light -> semaphore is a lead-in from "sema" (root word means "meaning") to "edge of understanding." [more]

posted message: [I have to post this in 3 parts, because it exceeds the character limit] Re Christopher DeWeese's poem, "The Pier," I also want to point out the structuring of the sound, which is very beautiful, & in a few places remarkable suggestive of buried meanings. Beautiful examples include internal rhymes such as amusement/improve & leave/years; consonance such as timbers/mumbled; vowel sound transitions such as the "o" sound in clouds -> robe -> fog & scoots -> closer; assonance such as children/interns, planning/family, & barnacles/arms/stars/warbles/darkened/harbor; phrase rhyming such as mumbled water/messy warbles. [more to follow]