|
"...all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it..."
--from Introduction to Poetry, Billy Collins
You knew you were in trouble the second you put the plate down on the table--
those sesame snow peas and truffles you drizzled with kumquat with ginger
to impress your poetry potluck writing group--when he said, “Not Chinese again.”
You knew you were in for it when he called your poem a travelogue of Paris
grinding down the wrong track with its Kunitz epigraph fumbling at the gears
as he blasted, “The old man got to wear the crown of Laureate just for his age.”
You knew, despite your mince and trim and folding in its metaphoric light,
this poem would be tied to the chair with a rope, have the life beaten from it,
a flabby bunch of bunkum flattened with his belting, "Where is the cri de coeur?"
And you knew in the way you know in a half-wake state when you hear a train
in the distance, barreling into your sleep a blur of whistles and grinds and whirs,
metal scraping rails, in a still night, deep in dark, its muffled blues note wailing.
You knew you must be dreaming, this standing before a train coming on headlong
at you half naked there, that train about to slice through what you peeled down to--
an awful tutu, mismatched shoes, feather cloche you wouldn't be caught dead in.
Then this man with a train for a mouth tells you this is not a well-lit poem
and the guy donning laurels in the first car misdirected it--that it's rocketing
down the wrong track on a collision course headed right for Gare du Nord.
And you thank this man, talking with a mouthful of train, for his observation.
But you don't write a word for days then weeks as you focus instead your eyes
on a wind riding dunes hitched to a slice of tangerine light, shape-shifting sunset.
You put your ear to the movement of earth beneath a frenzy of shorebirds
pecking the eyes from a head of a beached seal there. And speechless you listen
for the fading blues note of a train in the distance, off to somewhere, and far away.
|
