For many long months, driven from one philosophical port

to another - between storms, clutching to my bosom

treasured tomes of Shelley Browning Lawrence Eliot Rilke

Blake Shakespeare Sade Donne Auden Baudelaire  

all these lads between me and the black north wind -  

admitting somewhere in the laundry list of the canon

that freedom in verse is oxymoronic, better 

to be mawkishly Victorian than to admit

an inability to rhyme or mark a beat - 

for all these seasons, days and nights

my fingers found no work. My pen and keyboard

glared reproachful. I blamed it on maturity, 

the self-consciousness of mediocrity: 

Who but an adolescent could think insights

important enough to hear, and who but a genius

could commemorate immortalizing sight and thought

past youth? Hardly I.

And so with this shock of fall fruits, windfallen wordapples, 

I ate seeds and was forced to truth.

Eliot I am not, to find a still point in a dance

of violence and communion; nor Swinburne,

passionate and empty jongleur

of perversion and rhyme. My shelves burgeon 

with what I am not, and only a few leaves

of anthologized hysterics whisper the source

of my fecundity. My poetic cauldron has other agendae

than ideas.

Words drip from my womb and are soaked up

by scraps of paper. No philosophy but small words

of love or hate, childbirth, housekeeping, hunger

or suicide, to be placed on an altar as offerings

and turned into gods. I do it when the moon is full, 

and howl. I am the dirt of the grave

and the sweat of sex. Queen of minutiae, 

mother of petty magics, my maidenhead perpetually sacrificed

to rhymeless, meterless phrases. These stillbirths

are all I have; they cavort on undeveloped feet, 

attached to me by my withered umbilical cords

of dry ink. This is my art, my magnum mysterium, 

all that I have, all that I am.