mwirth: I think I know what you mean, but there's a little contradiction in the images, since solvent dissolves stuff (or eats into your skin)- so it's like- getting rid of something that is getting rid of part of you? Which is a little complicated. I visualize the verb "sloughing" more as shedding stuff that has been building up on you. But maybe you intend the puzzle of this.

tom: No, you're right, this should be recast.

brantley: The first part of this line is immaculate. Something about "black wet sticks" is really vivid. The last part is a bit off for me -- it don't really get what it means -- the pebbles are graying?

tom: Yeah, I had trouble figuring out what to say here. When asphalt roads go unpaved for a while, they begin to get gray or even other colors. Also, in my suburb, they "repaved" the residential roads with this pea-gravel like asphalt that eventually fused into a new road surface and then went gray. Hard for this to be meaningful to anyone besides me...

mwirth: I really liked black wet sticks too. And how all of this suggests how you look at the ground as you walk- which we do, not thinking about what we are looking at, but the imagery slips into our subconscious.. Maybe say just "gray" instead of "graying"?

samira: For what it is worth, we had similar streets in one of my childhood neighborhoods. And I am not sure that I got the description. That said, I want more than simply gray pebble streets--I want something that tells me how very closely you are looking. Can you describe it through something other than color--showing me that they are wearing out, just like so much of nature in the fall?

sprice: I really like this line. The rhythm is gorgeous, with the shorter words and accented syllables drawing the sentence to a breathy close.

j_moody: the "breathy" sounds are excellent here, to second the above comment, but for the visualization element of the poem (pictures in my head) perhaps you might consider personalizing the "warm white breath" in a following line, giving a small picture of whoever is breathing to anchor the breath in reality. it feels kind of disembodied to me now. we are left to assume the origin of the breath. this could also be a place to anchor the poem in a past time.

sprice: "dimmer envelopes" really catches how the gauzy late-summer haze really folds in upon itself to move into autumn, pulled tight to earth by the rain and the cooler, clearer weather. In the afternoon or on a grey day, everything really is wrapped in close, dimmer than it was before.

j_moody: with the sentence structure begining with "But then" it seems to me like the "hushed foretell of evening" should be *doing* something here. action verb? the sentence doesn't seem to resolve.

mwirth: I could completely conjure that smell in my, uh, mind's nose. I like how you evoked that.

j_moody: this line sounds good, but I can't quite parse it. perhaps "winter river"? winter and river DO sound good together, tho. it also seems like an action verb at the end of this section of sentence whould be appropriate, too. all of these resonantly-phrased qualities of "the smell" are left floating out there without resolution.

samira: I like the lack of verbs becasue you are creating a picture of something that seems very familiar, and I wonder whether verbs would detract from the imagistic aspect of what you have.

tom: This is another autobiographical remark that makes sense to me but nobody else. I grew up in St. Louis. Ostensibly the rivers affect the weather. A trip away from the cities and into the flood plains reveals an especially brown landscape that I think is unique to the big rivers. However, this poem isn't set there... oh well.

sprice: I think I see-- so it's not just "a river in winter" or "a wintery river", but "a certain sort of winter that you find around the rivers." Hyphenating the two would make that clearer than leaving them separate, where we try to figure out which modifies which. It's a river-winter, not just a winter.

brantley: The sound work in this line is great -- from cracking and hissing in the beginning to stones's rich, long vowel to the blowing-wind dipthong in "leaves." Wow, I sound like a wine critic.

j_moody: i too like the sound work in this sentence. seems like you might want a "dash" or semicolon or something at the end of this verse, tho.

brantley: Until this point, the piece doesn't read as memory. It seems more like a vivid description of something growing on -- it creates a present-tense experience for me, not a remembered-present-tense. Not sure what to suggest -- perhaps either bring the remembering aspect into the poem more or take it out?

david_a: Yes, perhaps at the beginning, something like "I remember another day, in which..." kind of thing. I like this, though. It sure evokes autumn (and I can use that word without pretension as I'm Anglo-Canadian, ha). Its brevity is crucial to the effect, too.

tom: So the poem is set during my seventh grade year, when I walked to and from school. The first two lines immediately makes this a retrospective for me, but not for anyone else. Maybe changing the title to indicate the setting would be a good idea. I like plunging into the phenomenology as fast as possible (for me the poem is really all about remembering the smell of the leaves), so I'm hesitant to expand the first lines of the actual text much. Hmm...

mwirth: If it was me, I'd title the poem "olfactory memory" and that would do it. But that's the biology nerd talking. The poem definitely evokes that phenomenon of instant transportation to a previous time by seasonal smells/feels- but the last line doesn't as much, since I don't think of it as an active remembering so much as an involuntary instant of experience of a past time, that sort of smacks you in the face.