Drawing on past experience, you learn that there are times, for your own sake and that of others, when feelings or knowledge must be tamped down, or, using a more appealing image, one must lay there just like a single flowerlet in a lily of the valley and wait. But how do you learn to walk the line between suppression, damage control and learning to wait and take things in? Here are 3 poems with thirty year temporal distance and written 10,000 miles apart, three different perspectives, and I still don’t know if there is a right one.
Of bales and bears
Rolled up in a bale of numbness,
cushioned
from the sharp edges of the world,
my feelings lay in ambush,
ready:
wail, yelp, screech
on impact.
Don’t unravel the hay
and expose them
to the cold wind of gaze.
It’s best that these bears
sleep their deep winter slumber.
Unwanted Visitors
Knock….Knock… Who’s there?
Your feelings!
We have escaped
though you stored us
deep in a well, so far and tight
we could have been Cheops mummy
in his Secret Chamber,
you swathes us so
we looked like those
poor Della Robbia babies,
and then, you hypocrite,
you drenched us with
unguent and balsam
so we wouldn’t smell bad.
But, nanee, nanee, nanee
we got away.
You held your jaw so tight
you discovered you had
a Temporal Mascellary Joint
otherwise known as TMJ,
and it was so unyielding
it went into a spasm
and you had to wear a neck brace for a month.
But we wouldn’t let up.
So you went to a chiropractor first
for the bones,
later to one for the soul
trying to get us adjusted,
to smooth us out.
And when that didn’t work,
you started writing poems,
tried to dress us up
to be put on display,
but listen, girl,
have we got news for you,
we are bad, we are nasty,
and we are here to stay,
and we know that sooner or later
you’ll have to open that door
and let us out.
(1991)
THIRTY YEARS LATER….
Damage control
What if instead you corralled
your provisional knowledge
your gut feeling yearning to run free
and kept it self-contained for a while
to bask in the sun and be idle
fallow, to all appearances
unproductive
undialectical
unchallenged
just chilling
seeking no falsification
nor confirmation
no followers
nor awards
nor rebuffers
disrobed of all didacticism
or need to be dutiful daughter
merely a single flowerlet
in the cluster of a lily of the valley
waiting for the nod
of its particular sun
and then for that tired lump of a bee
to settle in for the night?
and in the meantime
listening, unmoved
to the minimalism
of the woodpecker
content to sit there and divine
its melody.
April 2021
Image courtesy of Pixabay.