The sand is swept clean, blown clean, cleared of the crumbs left on the carpet, of what the cat tracked in, the sea dragged in.
Toni Mirosevich, “This Once Bright Thing,” from Spell Heaven: and Other Stories
I love sentences and all that they can do. There’s so much joy, exuberance, and aliveness in Mirosevich’s sentence. How did Mirosevich do it? Well, she turns sand into a carpet and suddenly there are crumbs and a cat tracking things in. It’s a playful metaphor, it’s a new way of seeing things. And fortunately, she gets carried away, goes a little wild, letting the carpet metaphor unfurl, and then, just so we don’t forget, she comes back at the end of the sentence to the sea.
But what first attracted me to the sentence wasn’t the metaphor but the sound and rhythm and repetition of words. There’s a playfulness to it. The sentence makes sure we imagine the sand as clean by repeating the word “clean” twice. We hear a hint of a new repetition as we go along with “of,” and another repetition at the end with “in.”
I imagine Mirosevich, typing away, smiling, finding pleasure and play in writing this sentence. It reminds me of Gertrude Stein’s statement, “Why should a sequence of words be anything but pleasure.”
The Making
This is a right-branching sentence, with the subject and verb predicate at the beginning of the sentence—The sand is swept clean. It’s also cumulative, with all the modifiers referring back to the opening subject/verb predicate.
Now the verb of the base clause is important. The verb is key. It’s going to set up your extended metaphor and once you’ve got that, you’re ready to run with the metaphor. Mirosevich uses “swept.” Remember, to write metaphors think of the world as organized into different domains. There’s the nature domain and the house domain, for instance. In nature, you have beaches and sand. In a house, carpet and crumbs. What do they have in common? Ah, messiness, things dragged in.
Now add a new verb that doesn’t depart too far from your first verb. Mirosevich chose “blown.”
Can you use epistrophe, the repetition of a word(s) at the end of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences? Here there’s the repetition of “clean.” Repeating a word makes it stick to the reader’s mind. Whatever you choose, the rest of the sentence elaborates on that word. In Mirosevich’s sentence, the modifiers answer the question, what was on the sand? What was cleaned off?
Now add three modifiers that refer back to your base clause—cleared of the crumbs on the carpet, of what the cat tracked in, the sea dragged in.
Do you hear the anaphora, the repetition of word(s) at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences? Here it’s “of.”
And there’s the use again of epistrophe with “in”—what the cat tracked in, the sea dragged in. You’ve probably been told not to end a sentence with a preposition. Well, in the world of creative and creativity, you can, especially to create rhythm. Do you hear the three hard stresses: CAT TRACKED IN, SEA DRAGGED IN?
When I first read this sentence, it wasn’t the extended metaphor that drew me in, but the repetition of sounds.
There’s the alliteration of sand/swept, and it’s echoed at the end with the word sea. There’s also clean/cleared/crumbs/carpet/cat.
Did you hear the assonance? Cat/tracked/dragged/sand.
The poets whom I know say repeating sounds like this is second nature; it comes naturally. It flows from their pen, their fingers. They do it all the time. They don’t even think about it! The other day, I was listening to a lecture by the poet Jorie Graham and she was talking about the sense of sound and how to develop it. Walk around, she said, listen to the birds, the whir of a car, voices, doorbells ringing. Do it for a couple weeks.
Give it a try!
Let me know what you discover.
PS:
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Thank you for considering it.
Hi Nina,
It's hard to add anything to your excellent analysis. I agree on everything, the lovely metaphor that slides in with the sand, the strange feels of cleaning and sweeping different mediums, the cat and sea almost trading typical actions, then the cyclic return to the start. It is hard to read a sentence like this without seamlessly gliding along its images, feeling them but not quite grasping them on first read. Lovely sentence.
Sand and carpet merge into one here. The sentence challenges our need to have things in their rightful place - well it does that for me. I keep going back to it and wanting to know - which is sand and which is carpet? I feel a kind of liberation in this - more 'rules' I might break. I read Tom's comment before mine, and I agree. We do indeed 'seamlessly glide along its images'. My own attempts couldn't approach the masterful effect of the original, but I had a few tries, which for me is the whole point of these wonderful posts and exercises. I'm gaining so much from doing them. Thank you again, Nina.
I wrote four this time, trying with each one to move closer to the economy of expression and aptness of image demonstrated in Toni's. Here they are:
1.
Her fingers were twisted into grotesque angles, tortured distortions, knuckles bent into knotted bulges, then fingertips, withered, twigs on a branch, spread wide as she raised her arm to wave as the wind might catch the leaves on an ancient tree and animate it in farewell.
2.
Her thoughts are cluttered, jumbled together, piled up and threatening to collapse into chaos, a stack of books, haphazard, carelessly built, about to tumble.
3.
Her mind for now is flooded, sunk in a deluge of grief, caught in a flood of longing and loss, the tide’s ebb and flow jumbling together all debris left behind, her tears, in time, washing away all sorrow.
4.
The sky is ploughed into furrows, clouds furrowed and dark, ridged and shadowed, soil ready to receive the seed, ready to release the downpour.