The Palace (at 4 A.M.): 1st poem

This is the first poem of my favorite series of poems (and in fact it is also the title of the series).  It was directly inspired by Giacometti's sculpture The Poem at 4 A.M., which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.  While I have occasionally been inspired by artwork, this was probably the most elaborate response.  In some ways, it is almost too slavishly tied to the piece (see below), but as I added more poems to the series, I grew a bit fonder of it.  (It isn't such a bad poem to kick off a series, Charlie Brown.)

The Palace (at 4 A.M.)

This early in the morning,
few are up except those who chase the bats away.
The backbones are hung in the closet,
sorted by size.
The guests are folded up and tucked under their beds
on the fourth floor.
A tiny woman, dressed in red, enters through the main door.
She has missed the last train.
She stands in the hallway,
rain dripping off her red coat onto the carpet.
There are three large doors behind her.
She will stand there all night waiting for day.
On the second floor,
the bathtub tilts up against the wall.
A plastic pillow floats in the tub;
it waits for a wet head.
The eagle sits on the roof
and sings.

Take the last two lines: "The eagle sits on the roof / and sings."  I am very tempted to change it to "The eagle sits on the roof / and screams."  In part because the eagle's voice is much closer to a scream than any kind of birdsong, and also because the piece is supposed to be vaguely menacing.  On the other hand, "sings" not only picks up the short i from "sits" but the g from "eagle," so it closes the preceding line particularly well.  "Screams" would pick up the long e in "eagle" but still doesn't close quite as well.  A real out-there suggestion popped into my head, that the eagle could hoot, which is actually a near-rhyme with "roofs," but then I would be tempted to change the type of bird.  (Honestly, it strikes me as more of a pterosaur than anything in the sculpture, but I didn't want to go that route; eagles are generally an imperial bird, which is why I went in that direction.) While I certainly don't invest every line with this level of detail, I do some of the time.  There is often a lot more craft than people realize, even in free verse.

I think without the tie to the sculpture, I would probably cut the 4 lines relating to the bathtub and pillow.  The rest are strong enough to remain.

Over time, I decided to fill in the back story of a palace in some South American dictatorship, pulling heavily from the magic realism novels that were so in vogue in the 80s and early 90s when I was in college (esp. Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch).  In several cases, I drew on other artworks from NYC or DC museums.  At the moment, there are 9 poems in the entire series, and I think it will stay there (at 9).  The majority are worthy of being shared, though I may change my mind after I reread them more carefully.