Milk

This was one of the first poems I remember reading from you, and it randomly popped in my head today. I'm also revisiting poems from many years ago and wanted to drop by and say how much you're missed on here. Your poetry inspired me and still does - I remember reading and feeling this whole new side of poetry after finding your work.

I love how you just lay out the truths here of her wasting milk. My mom leaves milk in her bowl and I remember getting frustrated growing up and seeing the remnants of milk in her bowl!

I interpret the tone almost as playfully resentful, but also something you notice as your relationship has gotten more serious. I know when I spend more time with someone, noticing their daily habits, sometimes it is the littlest things that make me shake my head.

I almost feel a twinge of sadness in this discovery of this person's milk habits, and when you mention "Sometimes I forget that I am on an island ", I feel a tone shift. I connected it to the last bits of cereal, the leftovers, the ones forgotten for the rest of the morning, and your feelings of perhaps needing to get away and anchor yourself so as to not sink.

Then, I feel a tenderness, subtle though, with the last two lines. That you knowingly go and buy milk even though you know, and maybe accept, that some of it may be wasted.

So good. So poignant.

This is fantastic colm,

I love the imagery you create by the lines

She is a terrible milk waster. She never told me before
that she leaves a pond in her cereal bowl
to buoy a few corpse-like corn-flakes,
abandoning it on the sink and rushing to work.

You have taken something small that probably happens to us all, (I will watch my wife now)
and turned it into a great poem of fine detail.

If I was to look a little deeper this could be a poem about that point in the relationship where you start to bug each other, the last line points to monotony

great poem, love the ending

When I read this poem I first thought that this was about milk and nothing else, when I read it another time, I still think that this is about milk and nothing else... well, though there is one stanza that makes me doubt it...
"I find myself driving around the block after work,
looking at the road and listening to the radio
a little too vaguely, a little too colourfully.
Sometimes I forget that I am on an island."

When I first read it, I felt that that was a bit out of place or that it needed some more info.. something that went with the relationship with the milk. However, after thinking about it, I think it works great with the rest of the poem.

The impression that I got from this piece is that the author feels that there is no need to buy more milk because the lady doesn't even drink it all.

By the way, this part:

" And putting her tea in the microwave
because she put in too much milk."

reminded me of the times, I have had to put my warm coffee on the microwave to heat it up after I added too much cold milk.. lol
Nice touch to the poem.

Well, i must say, i really liked this poem. I thought it had that funny side of it that had me glued from the beginning.

Well this is just a first-reading response, but in regards to meaning of milk (which I have just pondered more that I ever have in my life), to me it seems like a symbol for a disenchantment with the speaker's life.

"She never told me..." combined with details such as soot, corpse-like cereal, the phrases "too vaguely" and "I can hardly stand to watch", and the idea that the speaker is on an island seem to suggest a forlorn loneliness, one that the speaker despises and seems to associate with the woman who is being scrutinized.

Just a few thoughts.

The last thought, of having to buy petrol and milk, was what cemented this poem for me. It was delivered at just the right moment, with precisely the right words. Beautiful.