I'm avoiding political discussions. Can be ornery on other fronts,
however. Have wanted for some time to poetize re my considerable
dislike of poststructuralist thought and of Language poetry.
Trace
I see you, mostly at your computer,
sometimes in libraries, amassing
those hundred quotations
from eight or nine Frenchmen
that will last you
through your dissertation and
the first, crucial articles. But that's the future;
what matters now,
what you "master" now is the knack
of seeing nothing, no thing
(no word, that is), except for the doubts that are in it,
its silent guilts that cry aloud to you.
So that, as you read and wield
your green highlighter,
you become the avenger
of people whom each phrase or verse
ignores and thus obsesses about and oppresses:
women and homosexuals and slaves.
And the defender
of, call it an ideal
of something like understanding:
the penis overcome by understanding
for the vagina, the yearning anus
triumphant, the scientist
humbled before the stamping shaman,
the violinist trying to find
one note to hold at the edge of the vast stage ...
Yet I do not perceive
this vision as uppermost
in your mind, or even latent as you write.
As when, each day, religiously
(hopefully escaping
your mother calling to ask
with sinister undertone
if you're eating enough, and your father
numbly, numbingly
avoiding unstatable questions),
perhaps with some unpromising, decorative boy
to pace you, you run
beside the pseudogothic and pseudomodern
buildings of your world
and forth into the city, dodging
the Black Hebrew Israelites
who preach along Broadway
(and in their ecstasy do not see whites),
young Mormons in pairs,
young Hispanics who gesture,
and ladies in shadors - do you
rejoice, as in your youth and strength,
in noncommunicating truths?
No;
ideology isn't psychology.
And the danger of the park at night
is not a thought but a given.
I wonder if, with tenure,
you'll go into poetry
(or theory about it, same difference).
There is a future in non sequitur.
I saw you
at a downtown reading. You were with
a rising star, whose thing
is to shed from the lectern
pages from which he's read
some two or a dozen words.
His voice is half-toned, flaccid, amused
at the presumption of the signifiers
he defeats, rendering them
equivalent, equal, a matter
of consumer choice;
thus giving one in the eye
to hegemony.
You were the coolest girl there.
The others, undergraduates, looked cool -
a skill in itself - but didn't get it;
only mimicked you thinking
that you could drop this dude
as easily as he discarded paper.
If I could get you out of my mind -
if the vampire's mark
were not on my neck also, could I write
innocently, about meadows and love?
No! You, Jacques and the rest
are my wildflowers and sunsets,
and my itchiest passion
is that you in your carrel critique this poem.
Believe me, I note
your outrage. Pinned by a male gaze
that has presumed to
see you, to tell
what you think and feel
and bruise you in the net of narrative!
Do your cries resound through the stacks? All useless, maiden
(*see under*: pornography, Victorian)!!
For History, which turns your flesh and mine
to dust, hangs cobwebs
upon your hermeneutics,
as it did on those of the Scholastics.
Even now, hands and shovels
are digging from the future,
interested only in truth,
not vanity or play,
and finding, clutched in your dainty bones,
my voice. You mean what I say.
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