Julie Doxsee in Shampoo

The current issue of the online poetry journal Shampoo has some wonderful postmodern poetry. I love poetry that is challenging, even a bit oblique, yet well-crafted and with a sense of unity. Today, I've been looking at this poem by Julie Doxsee:

Erosion

Clouds take blue from could. Could be clouds are
the rind of a ripe sky.

An outside eye holds all lakes and oceans in one
mirror.





The body casts an object onto its shadow two or
three times. An eclipse lives nowhere then wrestles
awake. Nighttime can’t stretch darkness when the
moon is engulfed by noise.

Hold a piece of dust at arm’s length and watch its
two-dimensional twin burn at noon. Gray stranger,
make your gray a happier thing. Nighttime erases as
it grows over the eye.



The earth’s rind forms the hard outer layer where
fruit sprouts. Leaves detach from xylem after
sucking skin. A rock conducts its upside-down
mountain.



Discovery invites the collapse of something high.
Sky. Paradise. Wing-pilot. Echelon. Uncrater
holding bits of ground.


Uncover the rock. Fig leaves fall off and die, but
there are more fig leaves in a grove you’ll visit
naked.

Julie Doxsee
Shampoo, Issue 27

When approaching a poem like this--lots of wonderful imagery that may seem at first to be unconnected--it's a good idea to start with the imagery that strikes you. For me, the idea of an "eclipse" is what captured me first. In the third stanza, the "body cast an object onto its shadow--" the body in front of the sun creating its own small eclipse, resulting in shadow. "An eclipse lives nowhere--" it does not exist until that blockage of sun by an object, when it "wrestles awake." When viewed in the context of the title, "Erosion," we can imagine a sense of the self fading in the darkness of an eclipse, of some bit of self eroding off and forming shadow.

In the next stanza, the narrator continues the imagery of shadow and light. "Hold a piece of dust at arm's length." Now we have moved from a large body eclipse to a tiny particle of dust. Even something that tiny exists and has form; but at noon you can see its "two dimensional twin burn at noon--" the eroded shadow created by the blockage of light. This stanza ends with night, as does the previous stanza; the night "erases / as it grows over the eye." Here, the self erodes away into non-existence in the creeping darkness.

Think of this poem in terms of erosion or fading; of covering and uncovering; of the boundaries of self and how light and dark affect the existence of self. What do you see? How do you read this poem?