On Perspective
Oh, Adrienne, you are one of my favorite female poets my dear...
much love always.
Dreamwood
In the old, scratched, cheap
wood of the typing stand
there is a landscape, veined,
which only a child can see
or the child’s older self, a
poet,
a woman dreaming when she
should be typing
the last report of the day. If
this were a map,
she thinks, a map laid down to
memorize
because she might be walking
it, it shows
ridge upon ridge fading into
hazed desert
here and there a sign of
aquifers
and one possible
watering-hole. If this were a map
it would be the map of the
last age of her life,
not a map of choices but a map
of variations
on the one great choice. It
would be the map by which
she could see the end of
touristic choices,
of distances blued and purpled
by romance,
by which she would recognize
that poetry
isn’t revolution but a way of
knowing
why it must come. If this
cheap, mass-produced
wooden stand from the Brooklyn
Union Gas Co.,
mass-produced yet durable,
being here now,
is what it is yet a
dream-map
so obdurate, so plain,
she thinks, the material and
the dream can join
and that is the poem and that
is the late report.
October/November 1987
The Poet |
Comments
Post a Comment