[Inspired, although maybe inspired is the wrong word, by a line given by a friend: “they shoot poets in Mississippi”, and, as these things are want to do, the line brought to mind Andrew Marvell, whose poetry is very of its time, and how poetry shoots back.]
What’s so coy about a mistress?
Why to marvel at the hulled temptress,
shy now in her fallen flirtations?
It is for reasons precisely such as this
that they shoot poets in the United Nations,
and they call the game Poet Poet Goose in Kentucky;
there are carnival rows in Mississippi
named for stalwart timely movements –
Romanticism Drive,
Renaissance Way,
Avenue of Broken Enlightenment
-- fyi, the rubbish about poets replacing
philosophers in the public eye? An italicized
bold-faced lie, I say. It is hard to be
philosophical about a gun-toting troglodyte
who is off a ball or two and blames his neutered
state on a nursery rhyme about Jill and a crown
committing a crime under a gurgling bridge
where trolls reside and eat the feet of children…
Buckshot lends an air of causality to any circumstance,
regardless of the rules, and a poet in flight is truly
no different than an Andalusian apteryx or a Peruvian penguin,
an odd creature out of place without an escape route.
Some mornings come like this,
you let the words chase your tail and you imagine
a barrel between the eyes pointing the wrong way
and you, blue cross-eyed savant, chase the whirligig
or the ferris wheel looking for some new way
to say, for instance, new or old or stay or go,
and it is not long before coy makes sense,
and you exhume your awes at the annoying flirt,
or at least psalm a hymn to the suasive powers
of pout: no deal.
Homage all you want, too late, too little: poetry’s
past will eat you, and you are cuckolded by verse,
staring down the barrel of five thousand years,
all because a simple word rises from loess below
or quirk above and changes meaning:
coy for instance, or something like, but not,
love.
© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved
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