{"id":188,"date":"2010-11-19T19:04:11","date_gmt":"2010-11-20T00:04:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/?p=188"},"modified":"2010-11-19T20:26:35","modified_gmt":"2010-11-20T01:26:35","slug":"anne-carson-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/2010\/188\/poems\/anne-carson-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Anne Carson – Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony"},"content":{"rendered":"
I<\/p>\n

Do you think of your saliva as a personal possession or as something you can sell?
\nWhat about tears? What about semen? Linguists tell
\nus to use the terms alienable<\/em> and inalienable<\/em>
\nto make this distinction intelligible.
\nE.g. English speakers call both blood and faeces alienable on a normal day
\nbut saliva, sweat, tears and bowels they do not give away.
\nBananas and buttocks, in Papua New Guinea, belong to the inalienable class
\nwhile genitalia and skin of banana are not held onto nearly so fast.<\/p>\n

Such thinking will affect how a word like rape<\/em> is defined
\nor how sorcerers aim their spells or how you feel in your mind
\nwhen you address animals. Of course cows and cats,
\nsheep, pigs, donkeys, dogs and rats
\ndepend on their owner to keep or dispose.
\nBut your pony you cannot sensibly classify with those.<\/p>\n

II<\/p>\n

Another thee.
\nA summer’s day.
\nDouble vantage me.
\nNever to repay.
\nAnd Will in overplus.
\nMaking addition thus \u2013
\nyour pony is all these to you \u2013 and more:
\nhe can detect the smell of danger<\/p>\n

and will not take you through a door
\nif there is doom or pain there.
\nSo at the end of his life if you want to sell him for meat
\nyou’ll have to change the pronoun with which you greet
\nat dawn his shaggy head,
\nat dawn his shaggy head.<\/p>\n

III<\/p>\n

A body in the dawn.
\nA body in the cold.
\nA body its breath.
\nIts breath a plume.
\nA dance a plume.
\nA dance not thou.
\nA thou, not thee.
\nThou, breath.<\/p>\n

There stands.
\nBreath, plume.
\nHow cold is.
\nA dawn is.
\nHow still stands.
\nThy breath.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I Do you think of your saliva as a personal possession or as something you can sell? What about tears? What about semen? Linguists tell us to use the terms alienable and inalienable to make this distinction intelligible. E.g. English speakers call both blood and faeces alienable on a normal day but saliva, sweat, tears […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems","category-4-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":218,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions\/218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}