Proof of Poetry
1
I wanted first to end up as a drunk in the gutter
and in my twenties I almost ended up there—
and then as an alternative to vodka, to live
alone like a hermit philosopher and court
the extreme poverty that I suspected lay in store for me anyway—
and then there were the years in which
I needed very badly to take refuge in mediocrity,
years like blunt scissors cutting out careful squares
and that was the worst, the very worst—
you could say that always my life
was like a patchwork quilt always ripped apart—
my life like scraps stitched together in a dream
in which animals and people,
plants, chimeras, stars,
even minerals were in a pre-ordained harmony—
a dream forgotten because it has to be forgotten,
but that I looked for desperately, but only sporadically
found in fragments, a hand lifted to strike
or caress or simply lifted for some unknown reason—
and in memory too, some specific pain, sensation of cold or warmth.
I loved that harmony in all its stages of passion,
the voices still talking inside me…but then, instead of harmony,
there was nothing but rags scattered on the ground.
And maybe that’s all it means to be a poet.
2
And maybe that’s all it means to be a poet: even as I
lay there trying not to die
in my isolation room’s antiseptic quiet, I could feel
my body getting older and older: I didn’t tell the nurse
about the spider spinning
in the corner of the room between the wall and window
and the oxygen tent I huddled in—
and that’s when poetry came back to me,
the words trembling under
my touch—suddenly the web was mine, I
could crawl over the edge of it, see it thin as it is sideways, look
under—if only the words would talk me
out of my fear, help me decipher the writing
inside my cells like invisible ink showing up inside me
when my sickness holds me over the flames. But as the nausea
climbs into my throat and mouth, I can’t get out of my body—
and when the nausea’s over, I rest my head against
the pillow and the misery gives way
to even deeper misery, though inside it there’s euphoria
too—as if all there was to eternity
is that spider web in the corner,
no furniture, no me,
no other sign of life, its perfected symmetry
that the spider
must intuit, if only in its cells.
