1223

For a while now (fifteen hours?)
I've been feeling like writing
An ambitiously long poem, a poem
That would settle a number of
Uneasy feelings I've had about
The world of appearances and
My personal associations around
The word cute. This poem
Will perform laser surgery
On the vision of everyone who
Reads it, making it unavoidably
Clear not that we are ruled
A la John Carpenter by an alien
Race but rather that we each
As in the zen stories of Robert
Louis Stevenson or William Blake
Meaning black suppress for
An imagined good of the hive
The awareness of the mind-forged
Manacles with which we et cetera.
Have you seen that phrase, mind-
Forged manacles, in an ad in the back
Of the New York Review of Books
For a therapist in Greenwich Village
And Queens? That psychiatrist is
My friend Steve Moran. We were in
A writing class together. He
Wrote a paragraph about his father
Persuading a salesman by force
To treat his family (i.e.,
The Morans) with dignity. It
Is a very good paragraph, even if
You have heard the expression
"Came down like a herd of elephants"
Before. Cuteness in writing
Is a quality that smothers
In its cradle the wish for a writer
To go on indefinitely. Going on
Is another complicated problem, too --
Even those of us who abhor writing
That labors to make a point
Need to know that as at Chinese opera
We will be free to come and go
And yet there will be an end.
Poetics: a word that means
Someone is slipping from describing
Into prescribing, and yet
I like many others appreciate
Good manners. Bad manners are also
Enjoyable, sometimes. My fear
Of poetics, of annotating the process
By which I make poems is
Manifold, starting with the old
Who wants to know, as if every
Inquiry were a summons being served.
Perhaps you too have lived
In the kingdom of the double-bind,
Being required to speak Chinese
But hearing from your teacher
That even when you mimic exactly
Both pronunciation and tone
Many times in a row you have not
Come close. But after all,
Poems are just these words
That I love, and sometimes
Ideas, and as David Shapiro put it
At the end of the greatest book
Of poems all you have is a book
In your hands. The valence
Of that insight I prefer to see
As a positive relief and not
Depressing in the least -- how
Free! in the sense of unencumbered.
So many people in this poem,
And all of them men. After all,
Men have authority on some subjects,
Such as being men. And now I feel
Like putting the poem aside
For a while, as perhaps you
Do too. Very well.