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March 15, 2000 |
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Poet to Poet
"People wish to be settled. Only as long as they are unsettled is there any hope for them" ~Thoreau Poet, my life has been an instrument for a mouth. I have never seen, breathing wind, which comes from I know not where, arranging & c h a n g i n g my needs, so as to make an opening for his voice or hers, Muse, White Goddess, Mother with invisible milk, Androgynous God in whose grip I struggle, turning this way & that, believing that I chart my life, poet, my loves- When in fact it is she, he who charts them- all for the sake of some as yet unwritten poem. (pause) Twisting the wind, twisting like a pirate d a n g l i n g in a cage from a high seawall, the wind whips through my bones making an instrument, my back a xylophone, my sex a triangle chiming, my lips stretched tight as drumskins. I no longer care who is playing me, but fear makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, poet, when I think that she may stop. (pause) And yet I long for peace as feverently as you do- the sweet connubial bliss that admits no turbulence, the settled life that defeats poetry, the hearth before which children play- (not poet's children, ragtag, neurotic, demon-ridden, but the sweet apple-cheeked children) My daughter dreams of peace as I do: Marriage, proper house, proper husband, nourishing dreamless sex, love like a hot toddy, or an apple pie. But the Muse has other plans for you & I, poet Puppet Mistress, d a n g l i n g us on this dark proscenium, p u l l i n ..........g our strings, blowing us toward cornwall, toward Venice, toward Delphi, toward some lurking counterpane a tent upheld, by one throbbing blooddrenched pole- her pen, her pencil, the monolith we worship underneath the gleaming moon. |
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