Looms, a presence, twines, threads, she grasps, braids daydreams long
that weave no shape inside her strait-lace business day
till she goes home at night and plays her big drum set;
she pounds a primal back beat; sticks, bright, flash glow sparks;
wears one red sock, the other’s blue ... the cymbals spring
ascension. She purples through ponds, naked, pastel.
She swims through daisied, blueberry, mountaintop clouds
her lover plies and hugs her hair; kissey eye they play,
find the rubies, diamonds and mother clay that bled
like notes of flutes they swathed, smeared upon each other.
Through air like moonlit night time wings aloft they preen
as morning dew daisies teardrop to him like bells.
Author notes
Form: Rimas Dissolatus, originally french. Syllabic. Lines can be of any length within the Rimas Dissolatus, but all have same number of syllables, and these can be any number of lines in a stanza. Lines within a stanza do not rhyme, but corresponding lines in subsequent stanzas do rhyme, (and slant rhymes are allowed throughout .. my version) - from the New Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics, by Lewis Turco, University Press of New England, 1986
The Rimas Dissolatus is a charming, ancient relative of the Sestina.
this is a Rimas Dissolatus with two stanzas of six twelve-syllable lines
Comments
1 - 8 of 8
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Ahhh, so I finally come across this wonderful piece you'd mentioned to me before, the Rimas Dissolatus that Mairi so admired. I can easily see why, Danny. It's quite musical, rather rhythmic & lends well to your talent as a drummer. Beautifully derived from such inspiration as Lewis Turco does provide. I loved his canto inspired from the letters of Emily Dickinson. 
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Do you realise this is the only reference to this form on the entire internet - I know, I googled. Jiminy Cricket!
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that is amazing ... it is such a charming, merry little form requiring just enough discipline of the poet to free his imagination
i am considering holding a high point Rimas Dissolatus contest ... but I have never given a contest before
it is about time that poets who love free verse began to branch out and learn a little bit about the formal aspects of their love, for the swimmer who is always in the middle of a boundless ocean sometimes falls asleep, and grows bored and dreary of thought, and forgets that water comes from many sources, all of them fresh, not salt.
i have noted over the years the exclusively free verse poets tend to become sloppy and overly clever and underly beautiful in their music ... always tending towards a gray sort of angst and promiscuous irrational thought process which only extols their own ego and seldom bring the light merriment of depth profoundly beloved which the form poets gravitate towards even in their darkest of works
the Rimas Dissolatus is one of my favorite forms ... the others being, Sestina, Cinquain (traditional chansom), Villanelle and Pantoum ... as well as almost any repetitive line form, free verse or not.
you have made my day with your beautiful commentary on several of my poems, and thoughtful poetic heart
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Way ahead of you! (Although I doubt we should be conversing in notes to poems... never mind.) When I started writing poems - that was about late 2004 or early 2005 - I wrote exclusively in free verse. Shortly after that, my verse began to acquire structure - maybe a regular line length on the page, "stanzas" of a given line length containing discrete ideas, and so on. Suddenly I had "invented" the "Loose Sapphic" and was doing exactly what you're talking about above. http://allpoetry.com/column/show/2337109 Then I discovered the sonnet and took to it. Now I write form and free, depending how I feel. Blowing my own trumpet, I think my best-ever formal poem is "The Kursk Sestina" from my work-in-progress "Welshday" http://allpoetry.com/poem/4608545 (though you might not like it - it's far from light-hearted).
You have been writing some good stuff lately, Moqui. It has been been my pleasure to visit.
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Super. This is such a truly amazing portrayal of a passage in time. And you are so gifted in your use and words. I was enraptured.
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I really like this. It seems that the first stanza and the second stanzas are almost from two different poems, but that's cool. I think the second stanza is absolutely beautiful, as well as the last sentence of the first stanza!
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Yes, this is the quality of writing I have come to expect from you. This, has good solid cadence like a drummer with purpose to rattle cages screaming ca plane por moi!
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I like this very much, Danni. Although the form is very tightly controlled, it imposes no discernable restriction on your ability to juggle words and coin memorable phrases. Excellent.
By the way, I had no trouble reading this, unlike your previous prose piece.
Have a good Christmas,
Bill
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