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Transient
Poet Leaving Home
William Allen, 1986 |
Despite the Burning
This poet will need inspiration
One match and an addiction will not
suffice in the face of the storm
the house where he grew up ablaze
(arson eminently suspected)
the continuing lectures of his parents
This poet needs to eat
He needs to feel the first fat drops of rain
plunk down onto his upturned smile
He needs to see the lightning split
the telephone pole in two
the charred halves falling a-
way from one another
into the poplar trees
This poet needs clothes
a stick of deodorant
a roadmap and an invitation
to your house for tea
He needs these
if he is going to stay
if he is going to feel at home
in his own shoes
if he is going to write it all down
inhale it like that first sweet fog of nicotine
pulsing hard behind the eyes
until the ordinary evening
ignites
suddenly
with a flicker, a sizzle and a rising plume
of smoke
casting the poet into stark silhouette
the lone, shadowy figure bridging
the darkness behind him and the
suit of words and light he buttons
snug around the mantra of his bones
Posing for Rodin
A flutter, a flicker
from fingers of falling light
He does not tell me to stand
still
He does not carve stasis
Even the marble slabs breathe
here
Inflating with gasps of air
We both feel them pulling at our
flesh
My pulse throbs in stone
Is this the thing we call life?
This vain attempt to fill
what can never be filled or
full?
This grasp
so desperate to keep
all that it touches?
Let the lines and curves of my
back
reveal my story to the world
My numb defeat, my face down in
the water
Time would digest me whole
The cruel current whispers:
Life is
flowing away from us!
Do we let ourselves be filled?
Our own
defenseless departure?
Or are we always left behind
while all that we love slips
past
like driftwood?
This moisture clings hot,
intimate
Lithe frailty of history, pliant
celestial grace
Life and death are corporeal,
insatiable
The sculptor exhales his vision
restless vapor of gratitude
confusing motion with progress
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Garden of
the Asylum at Saint-Remy
Vincent Van Gogh, 1889
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In his painting, it leans into the foreground
dark, foreboding
lush on the side facing an insurmountable wall
and distant low hills
amputated
on the side nearest the hospital windows
The amputated limb leers out
ghastly and more alive than anything else in the painting
including the shadowy, faceless figures
strolling innocently along the path beneath
a yellowish, trembling sky, thick with shifting clouds
Life is an exquisite anguish, the tree seems to say
I endure because I have no choice
I am rooted, transfixed by the beauty of even
my unendurable pain
because I feel it so vividly
And because I am a part of something here that is
bigger than just me -
some tableau
that requires me in its ever-
changing choreography
I push out the greenest leaves
where I still have branches
while a dark sap bleeds from my amputated stump
welling up from the injury again and again before
spilling down my trunk
painters and poets
ekphrastic
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