Seeing this poem again made me want to share.

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.

They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.

I want you to see this before I leave:
The experience of repetition as death
The failure of criticism to locate the pain
The poster in the bus that said:
My bleeding is under control

A red plant in a cemetary of plastic wreaths.

A last attempt: The language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: Hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: Those mountains have a meaning
But further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

ADRIENNE RICH

 

 

Kind of makes me not mind being called a poet so much.

This applies only when I see good poetry.
If I see crap. Then I’m an AWPer.
Fickle? Never.

P.S- Posting a poem by another poet kind of makes me feel funny. In a weird-not-that-bad way.
There’s a title on it. And her name is attached to it.

I mean. It’s hers.
Forever.

Is some weirdo going to be posting something by me a hundred years from now?
Is my name going to be attached to something like that?

That’s unsettling in the most shockingly satisfying way.