Music Like Red Earth We drive north against evening's soft purple. The sun sets for a long time; we are heading into the solstice. It is that part of the land where people carve farms in the shadow of mesas and sandstone temples. When metal scratches her, earth rises up thick and red as old blood. On this thin black road we roll down the windows. The steering wheel burns my hands; my hair comes unbraided, flies into the wind. You ask me not to bind it up again. Smiling beside me, you play a red accordion at 65 miles per hour: rich waltzes, fast French tunes, sad Portuguese ballads and the bad one about four wet pigs that makes us laugh. You name the melodies that slope between one low hill and the next. Along the ditch, tall grasses sway with silky tops lit scarlet and hot. Our passing makes them leap like celebrants rooted in one place but dancing with all their hearts nonetheless. Notes and chords rush into the car like a lost flock of wild birds; tangle in our hair, stream out, soothed, into slow twilight. In the morning we will breathe their feathery scent on our pillows. Tonight, you play music like red earth, honor what we have found here the best you can: with the stain of a sacred color and that ruby accordion beating, breathing, for both of us.
I feel like the first stanza is necessary to set the scene, but now I'm wondering if I just wrote my way in using that first
stanza. I need someone outside the poem to tell me, do you need that stanza to get oriented?
Deborah - I like this poem a lot. Although I like the first stanza (especially the last two lines), I don't believe that this stanza adds much to the poem. Poems don't need scene setting as much as fiction or even prose. And although the title plays into those "red" and "earth" images in the first stanza, the second stanza really moves quickly into the music of the poem and music of the subject. The good verbs like "roll" "burns" "flies" really get the poem moving (compare to the rather sedate verbs in the first stanza). So I think you could safely remove the first stanza and the poem would not suffer. You might find a place for the last line in stanza one somewhere else in the poem to tie the red earth image into the music of the ruby red accordion. This is a fine piece with those qualities I admire in poetry: simple words painting exact images in an exciting rhythm. Best to you. Larry Fontenot
Larry L. Fontenot <poboy@hotmail.com>
Sugar Land, TX USA - Thu Apr 25 19:12:52 2002
Readers: You may wish to contact Deborah A. Miranda privately with your ideas about this poem.