On Tue, 11 Dec 2001 07:19:52 -0000, domfox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Since you my love have found me out
>crouched in the rank hollow of dirt,
>shivering like a beast in fright,
>my heart has let itself be taught
>by yours, the wiser; so my debt
>increases as my heart grows light,
>
>intemperate in its delight.
>(By such rich skill to be plucked out
>and cast into unceasing debt!)
>Forsaking the old stale of dirt
>to persevere as one untaught
>in worldly rubric of dull fright,
>
>I rise above myself, affright
>the training-lords of dark and light
>with fierce licence. So you had taught:
>"make all things new: leave nothing out;
>nor wretchedness, nor the scuffed dirt,
>the ledger of habitual debt."
>
>So, seasoned as I am to debt,
>how is it that the constant fright
>of turning once again to dirt,
>of turning - *damn* it - from the light,
>should so much drive my senses out
>of their composed accord? Be taught,
>
>who would learn somewhat of the taut
>compact between delight and debt:
>it holds; and there's no getting out
>of that, although you shake with fright,
>hurl imprecations at the light
>that lights upon creations dirt:
>
>you are that light, also that dirt,
>and everything you have been taught -
>to succour or despoil delight,
>to meet with spite or honour debt -
>is but the rudiments of fright,
>the sentence of your days spelled out.
>
>Renouncing fright, the heart so taught
>in debt stirs from its bed of dirt
>and rises to put out the light.
>
>(1998)

I did not expect that you had such a dichotomical mind, but I guess we all
have, in the Western world. The opposites posed by your poem, the question
itself, reminds me of Calderon De La Barca, and his character in Life is a
dream (I am confident that you will soon go and read it if you have not
done it yet).
Dirt as vice and  body  and light as virtue and mind are but the two poles
of our idealist philosophical and theological tradition: so I presume that
you have not solved as yet this scission, (as I hope you will never do, you
will never raise above these catalectic elements). I like the way the poem
gets entrapped by the recurrence of these two terms “dirt” and “mind”, in a
struggle that is lost in a Beckettian sense. One could imagine the narrator
in the poem fastened to his own bed, in a kind of obsessive self-sang, self-
taught lullaby, where he is at the same time the persecutor, the lover(s),
the victim. There is a kitsch ingredient in this post-idealist poem, post-
jesuitic, and it is indeed neo-baroquesque, with its shifting moods ,
desires, pulsions, passions, excesses: this element appeals to my taste for
any search having at its core the conflict between destiny  and free will.
I would love to put this poem on Transference, if you have nothing against
the idea of transferring your dirt and graces from a site to another.