Congrats, Kate!

 Challenge #124

Kate's Modern Thoreau is a pastoral eclogue broken into three free verse stanzas. Each shift in stanza coincides with a shifting perspective on what could easily be read as an ode to the unlamented author/gamesmen . A closer reading yields interesting results if sorrow, doubt, and indifference misnomer cunning, ruthless, and intent on confessing his sins hidden among common shortcomings and successes. Oh, Thoreau, his aching soul, the Everyman our speaker impersonates hides well his callus nature.


Line 1 is a masterful open, in the masculine sense of the word. "A human dichotomy," it bleeds with power the image of a halved human beings...
he reads poetry driving                Line 2 he tries to lull readers into believing he is innocent by revealing his distraction from the road. But as he is aware of this distraction he is also in control [to be continued].
a pick-up, hooks bream
on a line of dialog, skins
novels to their skeletons.
   
A misplaced metaphor,
he sears alligator on a fire
of imaginings, shoots dove
with arrows of prose,
carves venison
with a poet’s pen.
   
A surprise in darkness,
eyes in the woods, he casts
to the depths, reels up
a modern Thoreau.