Revising the Sleepwalker

some attempts at poem repair

I wrote following poem after a line by Vik Shirley and came across it again while preparing for a reading this evening. But I wasn't happy with it -- the heart and the urgent night images seem a bit too expected, so I tried some new versions and thought I’d share them with you and my thoughts about the results. Of course, the echo of Bill Knott's remarkable short poems about night and death are here, though I haven't got there yet. I'm trying to arrive at a poem that is full of energy, that is an electric leap through the mind and the culture, a kind of electric arcing between one image and another (isn't that how the mind works?)

ORIGINAL

not a sleepwalker’s hands
crescent moons or the space between
but the heart, asleep yet pumping
as if the night is urgent


IMPROVEMENTS?

1.
not a sleepwalker’s hands
or the space between 
but the crescent moon
palming night’s hidden queen

queen here feels a bit too easily gothy and Tarot-like

something about the missing part of the moon, something about the missing part of night?

so:

not a sleepwalker’s hands
or the space between 
but the crescent moon
cupping redacted light

or: 
…/
but the crescent moon’s
redacted light

still, this all seems too obvious. I think I need a bigger “leap” for the last image. I read about a hoax where an 17th or 18th c. woman pretended to give birth to rabbits (15 of them!) in order to gain money to feed her actual children.

not a sleepwalker’s hands
or the space between 
but a rabbit in the womb
instead of capitalism

Nah! Interesting but not yet.  So what happens if I change the opening two lines. There's no reason to keep them, or for that matter the form -- the four lines -- though I've imagined the poem to be this Knott-like short text.

a sleepwalker eats a womb
believing it the moon 
where do they walk?
east then west
north then south

I like the question here, but the ending sounds good but doesn’t deliver an imagistic “zing.”

Maybe the whole thing would be better with just those first two lines, those are the ones that are working the best.:

a sleepwalker eats a womb
believing it the moon 

I kind of miss "the space betweejn the sleepwalker's hands" which is what occasioned the poem in the first place. Something mysterious and interesting about that space:

a sleepwalker eats a womb
believing it the moon 

not the sleepwalker’s hands
but the space between 

Hmm. That has potential. I’m going to leave it for now, since I still have to prepare for the reading! If you have any suggestions or comments, I'd love to hear them. In the meantime, I've also included some visual poems which I do like. I'll have to write a piece about conceiving and revising visual poems too. It's a different if related process. Intuition. Capitalizing on errors or surprises that arise when making them. Vague intimations of where the work might go. Vague intimations of not going there.