-I decided to post this poem by Kit Schluter, he was the winner of last years glascock poetry prize. I picked to talk about this poem because when Kit won this award he was in college, the contest is for college students only, so he was around our ages. This poem was good and very descriptive with very original diction; although it was hard for me to find a central message. We talked about clarity a lot today in class and I feel like his concrete metaphors and similes are very advanced and unique but I thought his clarity was a little foggy. However I found this poem very interesting and was wondering what everyone else thought of the poem and if you got what he was ultimately trying to say through the poem or if you just thought it sounded nice with no real message. Feel free to comment your thoughts.   

To enter the chamber through which one must pass, the skin should be
soft and appropriate to be fashioned into leather. Remove the hair in
waxed strands and lace the body’s enclosures shut with this twine.
We say the same of the sky, its patchwork of amorphous signatures—to
find oneself beneath this sky is to close it with its own appendages,
its thumbs of rain that extend from the center of its palm, to
recognize a voice but see a different body.
*
That I am willing to gather for you living flowers, and yet bathe
In a tea of others dead—plunge in their statements, again and again…
Let us look at the sky we once had, but tentatively, where yellow
fingers meet, and
Strange, wet slits rain down rain down until the trees, when sawed,
collapse
Like dollops of rice pudding—and let us regard this sky,
We its product, and follow each other’s glances as one follows
The eyes of a cat stalking a dragonfly caught between two
windowpanes…
*
Empty rays sent out as feelers come to a new ground, illuminate the air
that hangs in swabs above the grass—these we call salutations,
Each a day horizontally extended over sleeping bodies that move in
sync with their dreams,
A fate of high-casted words packed down in a canon that, someday, will
no longer respond to this gunpowder.*
Your willingness is the hammer that breaks me. In sudden arcs it
hurtles like a birth. A ration of this body, cut out from its beliefs,
burns in making a signal of objection. The clouds toll seven.
Above the hills of a cemetery in the morning, a second body, as a flare,
hangs in a silent recess of time in the foliage. The clouds toll seven.
Beside the tomb of Abélard and Héloïse condoms are distributed to
mourners from a hot dog cart. The clouds toll seven.
To arrive as a body, to renew the tensions that alert us of our undeniable
misplacement. The clouds toll seven, and there is the shock of
having endured the passage from light into a darkness that is in no
way permanent.
The clouds toll seven, and we count the tolls aloud. The clouds toll
seven.
In recounting a dream, do we integrate the matters recounted? May I
promise to you these histories the voice has never before shared?
The clouds toll seven.
It was written on a grave, a grave, it was written on a grave: consigned
to perpetuity. It was written on a grave, a grave, it was written on a
grave: consigned to perpetuity.
The clouds toll seven, and we wait for the eighth strike which does not
come, and it might well be about to rain.
*
The hours surge away. By the force of an unforeseen gravity, they
retract into their turbid centers. We alone are responsible for this
recession, and thus we find ourselves in its midst; it attracts us into
a space of untruth when we speak.
In this silence, we lay our gratitude down gently.
There is an earth we cannot walk upon, for it is covered with our
descriptions of it, from which blooms a distracting foliage.
There are truths you do not believe.
There are angles of passing time that house you and cause you to
retract like the hours.One smells the infinite here in the morning before one has awoken,
where one must deny what one believes in light of what one knows
to be true.
Must this series be resolved, or may I wait here to be dispersed again
by the concerns of the sleeping?
Perhaps our frailties, as opposite extremes, must converge, and thus
would we ignore the long periods of silence endured, and ascribe
them to the faults of the days in which we remained together and
surpassed each other’s edges.
Without regret live those who would burn for the lies of a stranger.
From these heights it is unclear that it is us whom we are watching.
*
And our shadows that accompany us unwittingly? The thoughts that
thrust us into thought in the first place like palms from behind that
cover their own shadows?…
And does a shadow age as it grows longer, as when, for example,
beneath a setting sun or a waxed moon, the head elongates to the
size of the chest, and the legs, to the length of the entire body, and
beneath each planted foot there forms a darkness the very size of the
fetus from which they, eventually, sprung? The shadow ages
Beneath a source of light, but rejuvenates with each step toward the
source, never quite extinguished, but thrust instead upon some
surface that fades away for a moment in waning light. And this
blind companion
Who assures us we are never exactly alone, that we may always define
ourselves in relation to the negativity of our body, is brought into
the world through the spaces we occupy.
I weep for this body creating its own company,
For then, when the body is touched by light and there behind casts a
shadow, somehow it is then that I find my most faithful companion.
*
In front of these voices in chorus that rise from underneath the spokenwords as if these words were a song, nothing moves, ashamed of its
plaintive outlook when much more could be at hand.
Continue pulling those bows across your throats and I will follow you
into these new attitudes that speak from morning and break through
the darkness of their sources like the shoots of a crocus.
That is breath, what breath is, felt, coming on from a face.
I extend to you the crescent of the spine, and attend this body that
hangs like lightning glass from angles of conversation. I hear a
voice from the well; the reflection below in the pool is not mine, but
a thread strung around her neck that extends between two trees
fallen into wells of their own bark.
And may a reunion be the daring entrance into a space once shared that
one must become reacquainted with, or, more, that one must
entirely reinvent