A Prose Poem. 11/30/04

We were looking at old black and white photographs in the archives the other day. Chariot races! Real, two-horse chariots, a woman with long, flying, wavy hair and a wreath of flowers, a Roman robe; and a girl dressed as a male chariot driver, whip held triumphantly in the air. George Washington’s birthday dance, with half the girls as Marthas and half as Georges, in full costume and powdered wigs, doing a real colonial dance. A Roman banquet: those dressed as women actually have long enough hair to put it up, wound with ribbons in that classical style I’ve seen in pre-Raphaelite paintings and white marble busts. A dance card and pencil, all the names for the waltz and the two-step are girls’. Curfews, the unending daisy chain, old cheers that sound silly to us now, Shakespearean casts, all the men played by women, like a reverse Globe Theater. A rare photo with a man in it, the Alma Mater described as the “New” Alma Mater. A song in the college songbook about the blue and silver, one about “Wilson Women”—a studious one, one that’s only looking for husbands, one dressed in a suit and carrying a walking stick. A song about how parents are going broke because their daughter’s in Wilson and keeps wiring for more cash. Antiquated rules: signing in and out of the campus, campus curfew, written parental permission required for first year students who wish to associate with young men (I guess the husband-seeking Wilson Women were careful to get that one signed!). Pompadour hair, all the girls with the same hairstyle in the yearbook, funny long skorts on the basketball team, those odd-looking bell-shaped skirts to the floor. The antiquities in the glass cases downstairs (one from 1140 BC) have nothing on these pictures! The archive supervisor comments jokingly, “You guys go to a very strange school.” That we do. I only wish it were that strange still.

"The Firebird" by Edmund Dulac


“Nightjar” 11/30/04
(Nightjar: a European bird of the goatsucker family, named for its harsh call.)

I can outsing the nightingale.
You want to silence me,
Silence my harsh call
Of truth. But I sing
Out of love and verity.
You prefer to hear dulcet tones,
Soothing you with honeyed half-truths
And dead sweet full-lies.
I may not make you feel so dulcified—
I want only to jolt you awake:
I am a nightjar.
Yes, call me a goatsucker—
I drink the living water
From the lamb God provided.
My jarring, startling call,
Crying in the barren desert,
Promises a more satisfying bread
Than the stomachache reaction
To rotten sugar.
Only when you've flown above my head
Will my song sound lovely in your ear.



11/30/04
I wrote this in a notebook
While the prof analyzed a poem
In the textbook.

I hope someday you do the same
While the prof analyzes this poem
In the textbook.


12/8/04
Yes, night is the hour of death.
For those drifting lights in the sky
Half-reveal and half-darken all things around us.
What is unknown is most terrible,
And the moon is pale as a corpse.


Haiku 12/8/04
A shrub there flutters.
A brown rustle, a crackle—
A bird perches there!



"The Shortening Winter's Day is Near a Close" by Joseph Farquharson


12/8/04
I’m snowshoeing.
I spread out my resources
To support me,
To bear my weight
On delicate purity.


12/8/04
Displayed like some Arabian throne,
Golden footstool and inlay of gems;
Neck like a dancer’s, chin like a comtesse’s,
As regal as a stone queen on a tomb.
Ice in those curved lips,
Fire in those flashing eyes.
She seats herself like a monarch at a coronation:
You can almost see her train of beauty behind her,
Can almost watch the crown be played on her brow,
The scepter and the sphere in her arms.
Empress of each twitch of her finger,
Ruler of each turn of her tongue.

And when she smiles,
The sun breaks from behind the clouds.



"Time, Death, and Judgment" by George Frederic Watts

12/8/04
My minutes,
My weeks and days close in on me;
They constrict my throat.
There are breaths that must fill each minute,
There are tasks that must fill each day,
And every moment is over-sated with thoughts:
A supreme claustrophobia of being.
Between the things I must do,
The things I mustn’t do,
The things I do even though I don’t want to,
Each act seems beyond my control
And in spite of it.

Very much in spite of it:
My life spits spitefully at me,
Sticking out its tongue from the future,
Telling me I have no control,
No authority here.
Exiled beyond my true kingdom,
A slave to the constraints of space,
A traveler doomed to walk the path of time and never rest,
Not hover over it like a white bird.
Some days the finite is all too big for the one who was once accustomed to eternity.

Page I, Page II