Red Bricked by EVELYN LAUER

Red Bricked
by EVELYN LAUER

This is her spot:
a child in an apple tree, eyes falling
into the way things want to be
seen: fence sky lilacs stones:
what matters next is what
might just happen: the color
of bricks in her mind,
more red than they actually are,
brown really, but she makes them
as red as she wants them to be,
under a leap-year moon when the boy
enters her mouth, and leaves her
full of clouds.

http://42opus.com/v6n2/redbricked


For me, what actually caught my attention was the first line and not the title. “This is her spot:” The semicolon brought more curiosity to my mind and thus, I read on further. It was a poem of the view of a young child full of pursuances for imagination in her world. Her world is full of manipulations through the tool of her eyes… “into the ways things want to be seen”. Immediately, the speaker gives the reader an idea of who she is… a child.-it gives us a perspective and from who we are receiving these ideas supposedly. We are “warned” beforehand that this is a child and views from her can be an entirely different view we, as adults, hold of the world. Especially a child in an apple tree is a child full of life connected with nature and its miraculous details ranging from “fences,sky,lilacs,stones…”---. I also like how what really matters is the future.. “what might just happen”. This is kind of referring to how the imagination can take you to further places beyond us into perhaps how to mend the future even though we are not there yet; simply, it is possible through the imagination to create new things for the future and these “inventions” might just matter. I like how the young girl is hopeful for the color to shine and be “redder” than it actually is. This makes me classify her as a young spirit who is always hopeful for the best and strives to see everything as beautiful with the strength of her imaginative mind. She sparks beauty and molds her world like she wants it and does not let any other factor interrupt her creation of “redder bricks”. She does this under perhaps the strong force of the moon,perhaps like a strange force from the moon overtook her to create these inventions of her mind. The girl has experienced a kiss and is left with uncertainty and it is not clear as it was before with her red red bricks. She could manipulate the color and minor details easily with her mind but a kiss is left as something indefinable and can not be manipulated as she thought she could with everything. Thus, she is left in the clouds with a nebulous answer she cannott grasp. I enjoyed how the word “falling” is actually falling as the last word in the line and also how seen is isolated at the beginning of the line –emphasizing the importance of seeing-. I also observed how the words “fence, sky, lilacs,stones, “ have spaces in between them in order to give these usual common words are usually left without importance and how by being spaced out—they are given the attention they deserve as creations of life. I realized that colons are used three times; this possibly was used in order to show the child main spot of the child and base of mind of the child ----“a child in an apple tree,falling into the way things want to be---seems to be the main theme of the child’s mind in which everything is centered in. The structure of the poem is short and the structure reminds me of an hourglass—it is small at top , gets bulgier, once again short, bulkier, and then the last line is small once again. She was at first in a definite concrete place but after she is left in an indefinite place of clouds. Of course, it was this experience of a kiss that left her without a solid ground to stand on.