Untitled ("I thought precious was a puppy")

A jumpy, hard-edged poem that moves from innocence to danger, with swagger masking exposure.

A poem that swings from end-of-the-world dread to small-town swagger. It opens 'I thought precious was a puppy / There is nothing else / When you look / through the eye / of your end pf time,' descends into being 'devoreed in the night' and finding 'a crab / in this stupid stream,' then pivots to a brag about 'my new New York blouse' and a taunt at 'Those sissy's' who 'couldn't / find me / if I was getting hung / in the square.'

The structure is the meaning: a meditation on mortality - looking 'through the eye / of your end pf time,' where 'There is nothing else' - is interrupted and survived by sheer attitude. The night-self is consumed ('I go out and get / devoreed') yet refuses upkeep ('I ain't pickering up') and goes scavenging, finding 'a crab / in this stupid stream,' a poor, irritable foraging that keeps her alive. Then the New York blouse arrives like a flag of defiance, a piece of metropolitan glamour worn 'the dag before yesterday' through her own town, and the closing taunt is pure bravado: she is so elusive that 'Those sissy's couldn't / find me / if I was getting hung / in the square,' invisibility imagined even at the moment of public execution. The puppy of the first line - mistaking 'precious' for something small and lovable - sets up a tenderness the rest of the poem armors over with toughness, the speaker too hard now to be caught soft. The spellings ('pf' for of, 'devoreed,' 'pickering,' 'sissy's,' 'dag') are the source's and I have kept them. The opening line's exact referent for 'precious' stays a little uncertain, so that reading remains partly provisional, but the poem's swing from death-vision to defiant swagger is clear.