Week One - Sign Inventory - "Someone Is Beating a Woman"

Someone Is Beating a Woman

Someone is beating a woman.
In the car that is dark and hot
Only the whites of her eyes shine.
Her legs thrash against the roof
Like berserk searchlight beams.

Someone is beating a woman.
This is the way slaves are beaten.
Frantic, she wrenches open the door
and plunges out--onto the road.

Brakes scream.
Someone runs up to her,
Strikes her and drags her, face down,
In the grash lashing with nettles.

Scum, how meticulously he beats her,
Stilygaga, bastard, big hero,
His smart flatiron-pointed show
Stabbing into her ribs.

Such are the pleasures of enemy soldiers
And the brute refinements of peasants.
Trampling underfoot the moonlit grass,
Someone is beating a woman.

Someone is beating a woman.
Century on century, no end to this.
It's the young that are beaten. Somberly
Our wedding bells start up the alarm.
Someone is beating a woman.

What about the flaming weals
In the braziers of their cheeks?
That's life, you say. Are you telling me?
Someone is beating a woman.

But her light is unfaltering
World-without-ending.

There are no religions,
                                  no revelations,
There are women.

Lying there pale as water
Her eyes tear-closed and still,
She doesn't belong to him
Any more than a meadow deep in a wood.

And the stars? Rattling in the sky
Like raindrops against black glass,
Plunging down,
                       they cool
Her grief-fevered forehead.

-Andrea Voznesensky, translated from Russian by Jean Garrigue.

Sign inventory:

- The "someone" -- why vague, why continously vague ("someone" runs up to her), why attribute a distinct, particular event to an unnamed aggressor?
      -Not that this is a legitimate connection for analysis but, it was, for me, reminiscent of E. E. Cummings "anyone lived in a pretty how town."

- An obvious shift: the breakdown of structure as the peom progresses. Specifically, as the woman becomes "unfaltering" and "her grief-fevered forehead" is cooled, the strict four-stanza structure mutates, allowing for breaks, line shifts, and more jarring enjambment.

- The  inclusion of a "you" in the seventh stanza.
- Likewise, the "our" in the sixth stanza.
      -Perhaps combined with the unexpected reference to a wedding/wedding bells.

-The blatant judgement from the speaker in the fourth stanza--his inventory of derogatory 'nicknames' for "Someone."
    -In fact, there being at least three people present in this poem: the abuser, the woman, and the observing speaker (whether physically there or not).

- The "grass lashing with nettles," the "moonlit grass," "pale as water," "a meadow deep in a wood," "and the stars? Rattling in the sky/ Like raindrops against black glass." -- A series of allusions to nature, picking up in pace near the end of the peice.