Ne Rubeam, Pingui donatus Munere (Horace, Epistles II.i.267) While you, great patron of mankind, sustain The balanc'd world, and open all the main; Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend, At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend;
"As certain also of your own poets have said"— (Acts 17.28) Cleon the poet (from the sprinkled isles, Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps "Greece")— To Protus in his Tyranny: much health!
Ave Faustina Imperatrix, morituri te salutant. Lean back, and get some minutes' peace; Let your head lean Back to the shoulder with its fleece Of locks, Faustine.
The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass Pressed into it as you might at the beach rise up and brush away The sand. The day is cool and says, “I’m just staying overnight.” The world is filled with music, and in between the music, silence And varying the silence all sorts of sounds, natural and man made: There goes a plane, some cars, geese that honk and, not here, but Not so far away, a scream so rending that to hear it is to be
New Yor I! Graveyard bristling with monuments and receptions for business purposes! Has my right hand lost its cunning? It can't remember how to spell your name: unless I scowl, my keyboard won't offer the K: it throws up I instead.
I was actually born on your streets, Lexington at 76th. So was my mother.
I wanted to have a poem and I was pregnant. I was very thin. As if I’d lived on air. A poet must be able to live on air, but a mother must not attempt it. My mother wanted me to buy a set of matching pots, Wearever aluminum, like the ones she had. They were heavy and had well fitting lids so my suppers wouldn’t burn. My husband wanted me to give dinner parties. John F. Kennedy was running for office.
I sensed danger. Kennedy wasn’t against the Bomb or for nuclear disarmament. I joined SANE at its inception. Also Concerned Scientists. I spoke with Linus Pauling and encouraged my husband to help his partner organize Physicians for Social Responsibility.
There was a baby in my belly. I wanted to write poems. I had a crazy idea that a woman could write a real novel, the kind that shook the world. I hallucinated that a woman could be a poet, but she would have to be free. I couldn’t imagine that freedom for myself even though I could see it in Isla Negra when I followed Pablo Neruda. I could see it in the way he walked. Even if he were walking inside a dictatorship, among guns, soldiers and spies, there was nothing between him and his vision. Anything he saw, he was able to take into himself–there was no sight, no image, no vision to which he didn’t feel entitled. In his heart, everything–everything–belonged to him. Pablo Neruda was–more than anything–a poet, and so he was an entitled man.
I was a woman and entitled to nothing. I had nothing except a husband, a rented house, a set of pots, living room furniture, a frenzy of obligations, credit cards, anxious relatives, too many acquaintances, a gift of future diaper service, two telephones, no time to read, a plastic wrapped cookbook of recipes gleaned from the pages of the New York Times, and a hunger, a terrible hunger for the unimaginable, unlimited freedom of being a poet, and a baby in my belly.
I would have called Pablo long distance if I had the courage, if I had the ability to speak Spanish fluently, if we had ever talked about real things. But, what would a man know about a baby in the belly? And what did it matter if there were to be one poet more or less in the world when so many in his country were dying?
I woke up one morning and thought–I can’t have this child. My husband said, “You’ll have to get a job after it’s born so we can buy a house. You’ll need an advanced degree so you can do something.” I thought, I can’t. I have to write poems. My mother found a crib. Someone painted it white. A friend sent a pastel mobile with tame wood animals. I thought about blue curtains, making bedspreads, and abortions.
Pablo was silent. He was walking so far from me, I couldn’t hear him. My husband objected to donating more free medical care to the Black Panthers. I tried to make dolmades from scratch and located grape leaves preserved in brine at the Boys’ Market twenty miles away. I organized a write-in campaign for peace to challenge JFK. My husband thought it would be nice to have teatime with the children and romantic dinners by ourselves. The new formula bottles lined up on the sink like tiny bombs. The U.S. was pursuing over ground testing; I was afraid the radiation would cross the milk barrier. I had a poem in me howling for real life but no language to write in. The fog came in thick, flapping about my feet like blankets unraveling. I became afraid to have a daughter.
I called Pablo Neruda in the middle of the night as he walked underwater by Isla Negra. He moved like a dream porpoise. He seemed pregnant with words. They came out of his penis in long miraculous strings. The sea creatures quivered with joy. I said, “Pablo, I want to know how to bear the child in my belly onto this bed of uranium and I want to know if a woman can a be a poet.” He was large as a whale. He drank the sea and spouted it in glistening odes, black and shiny. I said, “I can’t have this child,” and he laughed as if he had never done anything but carry and birth children.
Last May a braw wooer cam down the lang glen, And sair wi' his love he did deave me; I said there was naething I hated like men: The deuce gae wi 'm to believe me, believe me, The deuce gae wi 'm to believe me.
He spak o' the darts in my bonie black een, And vow'd for my love he was diein; I said he might die when he liked for Jean: The Lord forgie me for liein, for liein, The Lord forgie me for liein!
A weel-stocked mailen, himsel for the laird, And marriage aff-hand, were his proffers: I never loot on that I ken'd it, or car'd,
My heart is a-breaking, dear Tittie, Some counsel unto me come len'; To anger them a' is a pity, But what will I do wi' Tam Glen?
I'm thinking, wi' sic a braw fellow, In poortith I might mak a fen': What care I in riches to wallow, If I mauna marry Tam Glen?
There's Lowrie, the laird o' Dumeller, "Guid-day to you,"—brute! he comes ben: He brags and he blaws o' his siller, But when will he dance like Tam Glen?
Little brown baby wif spa'klin' eyes, Come to yo' pappy an' set on his knee. What you been doin', suh — makin' san' pies? Look at dat bib — you's es du'ty ez me. Look at dat mouf — dat's merlasses, I bet; Come hyeah, Maria, an' wipe off his han's. Bees gwine to ketch you an' eat you up yit, Bein' so sticky an sweet — goodness lan's!
The poet’s duties: no need to stress The subject’s dullness, nonetheless Here’s an incestuous address In Robert Burns’ style To one whom all the Muses bless At Great Turnstile.
I’ve no excuses for this theme. Prescription is less popular than dream
You may talk o’ gin and beer When you’re quartered safe out ’ere, An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it; But when it comes to slaughter You will do your work on water, An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it. Now in Injia’s sunny clime, Where I used to spend my time
There was ance a may, and she lo’ed na men; She biggit her bonnie bow’r doun i’ yon glen; But now she cries, Dool and a well-a-day! Come doun the green gait and come here away!
When bonnie young Johnnie cam’ owre the sea He said he saw naething sae lovely as me; He hecht me baith rings and monie braw things;
Tonight Hazard’s father and stepmother are having jazz for McGovern. In the old game-room the old liberals listen as the quintet builds crazy houses out of skin and brass, crumbling the house of decorum, everybody likes that.
For decades they have paid for the refurbishing of America and they have not got their money’s worth. Now they listen, hopeful,
Roughly figured, this man of moderate habits, This average consumer of the middle class, Consumed in the course of his average life span Just under half a million cigarettes, Four thousand fifths of gin and about A quarter as much vermouth; he drank Maybe a hundred thousand cups of coffee, And counting his parents’ share it cost
Feeling her head pick up her body, question mark, blurred misstamped question mark snakes out of bed, trying to jiggle unhappiness as little as possible, not to wake pain, not to raise a shade,
Prosaic miles of streets stretch all round, Astir with restless, hurried life and spanned By arches that with thund’rous trains resound, And throbbing wires that galvanize the land; Gin-palaces in tawdry splendor stand; The newsboys shriek of mangled bodies found; The last burlesque is playing in the Strand— In modern prose all poetry seems drowned. Yet in ten thousand homes this April night An ancient People celebrates its birth To Freedom, with a reverential mirth, With customs quaint and many a hoary rite, Waiting until, its tarnished glories bright, Its God shall be the God of all the earth.
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