Hold That Pose
I’ve started addressing my female students
as “dear.” I’ve started alluding
to “students” in poems, thereby admitting
that almost all poets teach and that
poetry is a minor academic
hobby. I long since started referring
to “poetry,” “poems,” “poets,” “the poem,”
“the poet” in poems, which, unless
you’re Rilke or Wallace Stevens, or too
provincial to know better, is a major
no-no, reducing poetry, poems, etc.
to the level of a domestic appliance like
a washer-dryer or email. And, deplorably,
I mention “I,” which has the same effect.
But the worst is addressing my female students
as “dear.” It may be an elegy
for youth and sexuality; a plea,
on the basis of age, for their forbearance; a way
of making myself seem paternal and them
work harder; or, because I’m not yet
decrepit enough to pull it off,
an attempt to appear residually cute.
The wattles in the mirror contain
specialized cells tuned
to falling real-estate values, health-plans
planning to double their rates or abandon
my pre-existing conditions;
the famous inner seventeen-year-old
avoids mirrors, therefore,
and spends his whole day hating and afraid.
The thought, on whose keen double edge
I prided myself, has sprouted
new blades like an unruly gadget,
cutting my fingers as I try to write
my sermons, which are further hampered
by fragmentary text and doubtful doctrine;
today’s is “Nothing is hidden.”
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