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On a hot and hard and humid day,
The taste and scent of my own sweat
And the sound of my own voice
Talking to shadows
In the utter stillness
Amid the blinding brightness of sunlight
Spilling through the clouds
In steam showers laden with rainbows
That never quite touch this earth--

These become my daydream of love.

Also in this dream:
The iron spikes of a thistle,
Small yet strong
And pushing through
The center of this vision,
Pushing back the rainbows.

This is the nature of love,
The nature of my heart,
In this dream.

It is a lonely thing.

The summer night is like a perfection of thought. (Wallace Stevens)

It seems to me poetry is as much about subterfuge as it is about honesty. While it gets at the exquisite beauty and truth (same thing?) of a single experience, it does so in a way that maintains a distance between speaker and audience. Diction and structure see to it. They allow the writer the wriggle room to say, "No, it wasn't about that at all," or "No, I wasn't using that word in that way," or "I wasn't thingking of you at all." A comma here or there or not can draw the fine line between headlong emotion and cold restraint. Dangerous stuff.

Reading Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets in the collection Fatal Interview is all about that "come hither so I can be invisible" effect of poetry. The arcane vocabulary and stylized structure shield these fankly erotic poems from the reader even as they dance naked on the page. By the time the poem is clear, Millay has dressed herself and left the bedroom. There's really no conversation between poet and audience. She's done and satisfied and that's it.

Writing this poem--over and over again and over and over possibly tomorrow because I can't quite settle myself with it--I couldn't help but feel over and over again the pain of love--of being present heart and soul--only to be disappointed by the discovery of indiscretion, of broken faith. Of feeling through to the bone the pain of broken faith. I wanted to get past it and write a happy thing about a summer day. But then the thoughts of summer heat--the too much of weather we New Englanders experience in summer and winter--would not step aside from its partner in my mind--the solitude born of brokenness and the pathetic discover that life goes on and might as well be felt thoroughly. So I let it write itself and came back over and over and tried to reason with it.

What I have here is a lonely thing that refuses to participate in that conversation.Such is the nature of truth and perhaps even of beauty.

One Single Impression