Overdrawn
I want to
redraw what I withdrew,
to square
accounts with Erato,
that poetic
muse of cross words
who hides
when I need her most.
You know,
when it’s early morning
and as poet
in residue
I’m
supposed to write.
Well, today
I’m overdrawn. I throw
back the
counterpane to January
dark and
half a waning moon.
My wolves
lick their chops while
I make ablutions.
My barked shin
howls in
pain. There will be a scar
which heals
slow at my age.
How do I assuage
my acedia,
my ennui,
my monkish habit
no nun
would approve beneath
cowl and
stoic face when she boards
the Missoula
to Cincinnati
This long
question leaps from memory.
Why do
blue nuns ride alone only
when they’re
going home? Tell me,
Madeline,
if you know, why,
when the
singing ends, Wallace turns
at Key West
to write poems
of ghostly demarcations?
He walks home
in iambic pentameter,
revives the
overdrawn account
of blank
verse, while those around him
wait in
waist coats for the next
black bird
to fly out of sight
and mark the
edge of art and poetry.
—Donnell
Hunter
12 January 2012
I love the "blue nuns" line and the rest of the poem. "Tell me, . . ." There is something of Mark Strand's "When the Vacation Is Over For Good," which still rings in my ear. Your poem is counterpoint to his, the tone far more joyful as you move towards friends and poetry and the ocean while Strand's narrator finds himself at the end of life, which he discovers was a mere vacation. He wishes there were a Madeline who could survive to tell him "why the singing" has to end. You say, "when the singing ends, Wallace Stevens turns up with his black birds, and autumn rain and ever-always bearing fruit trees in a kinder, gentler heaven--after the vacation ends and another "Sunday Morning" spent, not in a church but in a poem.
ReplyDeleteI don't know Mark Strand's poem. My Stevens reference is to "The Idea of Order at Key West" that begins "She sang beyond the genius of the sea . . ." and ends
Delete"Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds."