Week #15--Sign Inventory

Week #15—Sign Inventory

A Mask Called Nothing

by Amy Pence

So we enter the dog days—summer

its bedraggled undergrowth, feasting

insects, spiders spinning, unspun.

Everything swarming to the grand ticking

surface:  verdure & verdant—a plentitude,

identity leaks from our faces, a carnival

of exiles:  subversion, ecstasy, anarchy,

apathy, masochism—listless and rogue.

Then finally, nothing:  its jade eyelids

around sockets, skin textured—

wind in the bestial unknowing

genuflects to an embarrassment of days.

Unloosed from the Dark, a lowly coming—

all the names unleash their quiet.

Confessional style

voice in the collective “we” (seemingly)

enjambment

alliteration and assonance of ‘s’ sounds in lines two through four

and five.

more alliteration in “verdure and verdant”

a list of nouns related to feelings and states of mind

two uses of colons; four dashes

personification of summer “its jade eyelids,” “skin textured”

strange capitalization of Dark

odd phrasing in “identity leaks from our faces”;

“listless and rogue”; “an embarrassment of days”;

“unleash their quiet.”

seven two-line stanzas