Alan Dugan Telling Me I Have A Problem With Time Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABCDEFGHIJKDLMNOPQAR LSTCUVGWICSXYZA2B2C2 LD2E2D2F2B2He reads my latest attempt at a poem | A |
and is silent for a long time until it feels | B |
like that night we waited for Apollo | C |
my mother wandering in and out of her bedroom asking | D |
Haven't they landed yet At last | E |
Dugan throws it on the table and says | F |
This reads like a cheap detective novel | G |
and I've got nothing to say about it It sits | H |
naked and white with everyone's eyes | I |
running over it The week before | J |
he'd said I had a problem with time | K |
that in my poems everything | D |
kept happening at once In | L |
the voice of Mission Control | M |
told a man named Buzz | N |
that there was a bunch of guys turning blue | O |
down here on Earth and now I can understand | P |
it was with anticipation not sickness Next | Q |
Dugan says Let's move on The attempted poem | A |
was about butterflies and my recurring desire | R |
to return to a place I've never been | L |
It was inspired by reading this | S |
in a National Geographic monarchs | T |
stream northward from winter roosts in Mexico | C |
laying their eggs atop milkweed | U |
to foster new generations along the way | V |
With the old monarchs gone I took this line as the title | G |
and all ties to the past ostensibly cut | W |
the unimaginable happens butterflies | I |
that have never been to that plateau in Mexico | C |
roost there the next winter I saw this | S |
as a metaphor for a childhood I never had | X |
until Dugan pointed out | Y |
that metaphor has been dead for a hundred years | Z |
A woman new to the workshop leans | A2 |
behind his back and whispers I like it | B2 |
but the silence is seamless as deep | C2 |
as outer space That night in | L |
I could turn my head from the television and see | D2 |
the moon | E2 |
filling the one pane over the bed completely | D2 |
as we waited for Neil Armstrong | F2 |
to leave his footprints all over it | B2 |
Nick Flynn
(1)
Poem topics: , Print This Poem , Rhyme Scheme
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