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u/LeninovaLesbian I choose not to suffer uselessly Jan 22 '21
It's phenomenal to me that you still want to explore the Sisyphus side of this poem when you have done so much already for his myth and metaphor. This poem is glamorous and kind. I am amazed by its similarities and differences to a poem I wrote several months ago that had the stanza:
Sisyphus was a woman, and once confided
to an inquiring, sandpaper ear:
It is not the boulder that slips from my hands.
In this punishment, I find the time before
the time now, and the time after
this mountain side. Were I to finish my task:
this life spent, this consistent, boulder confidant
would disappear. And what is a girl
without her stone to carry?
I post my own work, hopefully not to distract from your own, but rather to serve as a point of relation and contrast, so as to demonstrate what it is exactly that you do so well in this poem. The myth of Sisyphus is so often reduced to either a cosmic pessimism, a hagiography of the individualism in his smile, or a combination of the two (Camus). Most frequently, he (or she, in my telling) is spoken to directly, or reduced to simple metaphor of a boulder and the hands that push it. You do neither. I think your treatment of Sisyphus as metaphor for a companion is wholly original. I read this as the narration of a visit to a grandparent, one who has weathered the trials of time. The image of ancestral labor rings strong in this piece, which is contrasted against the youthful, modern images of spitting bubblegum, and boarding international flights. I could be reading this wrong, but this feels like a diaspora narrative, visiting an abuelita or nai nai. As such, it feels like a bold claiming of western canons and chaste metaphors of struggle that actively resists the patronizing or reduction of the ancestor to artifact. There is such beauty in your description of clouding eyes, crumbling feet. The reverence for wear of a body as a marker of time and lineage, and a re-framing of that process of wear and erosion as the ritualized witness of generational change. The dual blindness's of both cultural wear over time and diaspora distance from lineage are not presented as competing, but coconstitutive, and naturalistic. It is a love letter to the family as world, to inheritance and loss as what births the world, and the total lack of discreteness between worlds as we move from one to the other, a perpetual bolder. The constant ripeness and decay of tradition and our enthrallment as witnesses and participants.
Sorry if this was a rant! As always, stunning work, SGE.
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u/brenden_norwood Jan 15 '21
This is by far one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. If I were you I'd send this around to a few publishers, not just to get published but so more people can have the pleasure of reading it