Book: Map: Collected and Last Poems
Quotes of Book: Map: Collected and Last Poems
Poetry Reading To be a boxer, or not to be there at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds? Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare- it's time to start this cultural affair. Half came inside because it started raining, the rest are relatives. O Muse. The women here would love to rant and rave, but that's for boxing. Here they must behave. Dante's Inferno is ringside nowadays. Likewise his Paradise. O Muse. Oh, not to be a boxer but a poet, one sentenced to hard shelleying for life, for lack of muscles forced to show the world the sonnet that may make the high-school reading lists with luck. O Muse, O bobtailed angel, Pegasus. In the first row, a sweet old man's soft snore: he dreams his wife's alive again. What's more, she's making him that tart she used to bake. Aflame, but carefully-don't burn his cake!- we start to read. O Muse. book-quoteMemory Finally Memory's finally found what it was after. My mother has turned up, my father has been spotted. I dreamed up a table and two chairs. They sat. They were mine again, alive again for me. The two lamps of their faces gleamed at dusk as if for Rembrandt. Only now can I begin to tell in how many dreams they've wandered, in how many crowds I dragged them out from underneath the wheels, in how many deathbeds they moaned with me at their side. Cut off, they grew back, but never straight. The absurdity drove them to disguises. So what if they felt no pain outside me, they still ached within me. In my dreams, gawking crowds heard me call out Mom to a bouncing, chirping thing up on a branch. They made fun of my father's hair in pigtails. I woke up ashamed. So, finally. One ordinary Friday night they suddenly came back exactly as I wanted. In a dream, but somehow freed from dreams, obeying just themselves and nothing else. In the picture's background possibilities grew dim, accidents lacked the necessary shape. Only they shone, beautiful because just like themselves. They appeared to me for a long, long, happy time. I woke up. I opened my eyes. I touched the world, a chiseled picture frame. book-quoteNothing Twice Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice. Even if there is no one dumber, if you're the planet's biggest dunce, you can't repeat the class in summer: this course is only offered once. No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with exactly the same kisses. One day, perhaps, some idle tongue mentions your name by accident: I feel as if a rose were flung into the room, all hue and scent. The next day, though you're here with me, I can't help looking at the clock: A rose? A rose? What could that be? Is it a flower or a rock? Why do we treat the fleeting day with so much needless fear and sorrow? It's in its nature not to stay: today is always gone tomorrow. With smiles and kisses, we prefer to seek accord beneath our star, although we're different {we concur} just as two drops of water are. book-quoteLife While-You-Wait.Performance without rehearsal.Body without alterations.Head without premeditation.I know nothing of the role I play.I only know it's mine. I can't exchange it.I have to guess on the spotjust what this play's all about.Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.I trip at every step over my own ignorance.I can't conceal my hayseed manners.My instincts are for happy histrionics.Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.Words and impulses you can't take back,stars you'll never get counted,your character like a raincoat you button on the run -the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!But here comes Friday with a script I haven't seen.Is it fair, I ask{my voice a little hoarse,since I couldn't even clear my throat offstage}.You'd be wrong to think that it's just a slapdash quiztaken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it is.The props are surprisingly precise.The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.The farthest galaxies have been turned on.Oh no, there's no question, this must be the premiere.And whatever I dowill become forever what I've done." book-quote
