I just read Jaya Savige’s poem, Carousel, and am freshly reminded of how much I need to learn. This poem can be read aloud. How perfectly magnificently self indulgent. This is word porn.
Here, read it. It’s amazing! I’ve pasted it below too, for those of you who are too lazy. Hopefully that’s okay…
Carousel
By Jaya Savige
Dense night is a needs thing.
You were lured
in a luminous canoe
said to have once ruled
a lunar ocean.
The 2 am soda pour
of stars is all but silent;
only listen —
sedater than a sauropod
in the bone epics
it spills all the moon spice,
releasing a sap odour
that laces
us to a vaster scale
of road opus.
A carousel of oral cues,
these spinning sonic coins.
A slide show of old wishes.
How do you unknot a perfect tangle of feeling like this to understand what it all looked like to begin with?
Sensory brainstorming time. Let’s go…
Nighttime:
- Carousel (night sky is like a carousel)
- Still
- Epic
- Needs
- Ocean
- Sedate
- Moon
- Spice (stars or moonlight)
- Sap (strong smells at night)
- Vaster scale
- Oral cues (stories of stars)
- Spinning (dizzying feeling looking up)
- Slide show of old wishes (light travel and memories of all the wishes people made looking up at the stars. A slideshow because it’s still playing as the universe expands)
- Carousel (us going round and round. It appearing that the stars do)
Stanza 1: authorial injection. Ember of feeling.
Stanza 2: how author got here. What is the luminous canoe that once ruled an ocean? The journey that got him here? The journey through the womb?
Stanza 3: in the silence author realizes it is all but silent.
Stanza 4: the sky has been anthropomorphized and is spilling the moonlight quite calmly.
Stanza 4: and this moonlight, or nighttime, brings the awareness of the past that much closer, tying everything that came before to us.
Stanza 5: author reminisces on what these stars and galaxies are and why it is not quiet looking at them, because they are oral cues.
Stanza 6: looking up at the night sky author realizes it is all old wishes, and all these stanzas may be too.
The secret to this poem? Alliteration. Imagery. Word choice.
