Last night there was raclette and Kirsch and HILARIOUS dinner, my favorite kind, and this morning I woke up with one swollen tonsil, which I am treating with about a hundred glasses of emergen-c and a trip to Ten Thousand Waves tonight.
Dana and I went to Clafoutti’s for breakfast and talked about my manuscript, which she RADICALLY re-sequenced, putting all the older, narrative and emotional poems up front and burying all the weirdo experimental new stuff in the back. Her conviction: older poems are more formed, more appealing. I was shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
She also advocated for some radical revisioning of my Dear Sister poem, which I have done and (though it pains me to excise “make it sleek and winnowing at your fly-garnished hook”) it looks different. Leaner. Maybe better?
Dear Sister,
You don’t have to pay your credit card. Just try to get out of the bathtub.
Try to think of the sour mid-mouth grit
from an afternoon shower that has slicked desert dust,
a contained system in the sky, a gray beast
that lurks between territories of sun and soil.
You needn’t challenge anyone’s reign.
You can, you know, see for hundreds of miles.
Wherever you live, work in the interstitial spaces.
It is not flying but the marriage of self and air.
She does not work in grief not black grief curtain descending grief God’s silent disappointment grief
but the moment of unfurling.
A navel mouth singing heart songs in the shower’s clatter. There.
You see? Not grief at all.
Because you will be afraid of death, go to bed with your jealousy.
Really.
Lay full length against it and tongue it open,
quicken its breath, summon its night cries with your teeth and fingers.
Hone your technique, stage seductions for your poems,
find lovers around whom you’ll wind language.
There is nothing greater.
Analysts will tell you not to read in bed,
not to do anything but sleep, so as to sleep sound.
They recommend sterilization, the slow well-meaning
mauve of maturity. But ask them: where do you fuck?
What bathroom mirror affirmation ever became a poem?
jskah said,
November 25, 2008 at 3:05 pm
yes yes yes! i support fully, you know my issues with the previous incarnation of this sucker (which even before, still SO GOOD) obvs but yeah, rock on. i still feel weird about the last line being where it is (um, last, bizarrely enough), but i think everything that’s happened here has made it stronger.
anyway you can stick sleek & winnowing elsewhere; yr a poet, after all. hoarders unite!
anatomyofadress said,
November 25, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Right. Wallace Stevens with a desk full of paper scraps? CHECK.
I don’t know what to do about it either. The title and the last line are the only references to it being like, an address to someone in the world, a poem about making poems, etc. And it’s Dana’s proposed FIRST POEM in the sequence, so that problem ought to be solved, but it’s a head-scratcher. Although if it is an address to self (and in reality, it kind of is me taking my Self by the hand and saying very sensible parent-y things) it might make sense. But as Dana said as we careened down La Bajada hill yesterday: it is difficult to know what an audience’s tolerance for ambiguity and plain ol’ not-knowing will be. You know?
Oh, and a friend just told me looks a little like Mary Oliver in this incarnation, which you know, GAH!/YAY!.
ihatedanger said,
November 25, 2008 at 5:08 pm
so excited to hear about your poems, always.
anatomyofadress said,
November 25, 2008 at 5:13 pm
XO!
jskah said,
November 26, 2008 at 4:48 pm
hey dudette, just got yr email re: last line & am thinking about it, thinking about it. not sure if that’s exactly what it needs but i like that you went there! slimming, slimming, straight to the essence.
unreliable narrator said,
November 28, 2008 at 8:03 pm
“Lay full length against it and tongue it open,”
LIE full length? The usage Nazi never sleeps…also, that way you get the double-entendre; and
“Hone your technique, stage seductions,
find lovers around whom you’ll wind language.
Analysts will tell you…”
Personally, I don’t want/need to be told there’s nothing greater. Also I have this whole tired thing about “poem” or “poet” in a poem–why leave out any readership, and also it’s clear what it’s about without your saying so–about any human making, the ambivalence concerning which, and the relationship of the maker to herself. Thus this seems leaner and meaner to me yet, without those particular pointings.
I envy, passionately: the slow well-meaning mauve.