Once I gave birth to living metaphors.
Not poems now, Ben Jonson, they became themselves.
In despair of poetry, which had fled away,
From loops and chains of children, these were let grow:
“The little one is you all over …”
They fulfill their impulses, not mine.
They invent their own categories,
Clear and arbitrary. No poem needs them.
They need only what they say:
“When I grow up I’m going to marry a tree.”
Children do not make up for lost occasions
“You’d rather kiss that poem than kiss me.”
Creation halts, for denials and embraces,
Assurances that no poem replaces them,
Nor, as you knew, Ben, holds the mirror to them,
Nor consoles the parent-artist when they go.
Poems only deprive us of our loss
(Deliberate sacrifice to a cold stanza)
If Art is more durable to us than children,
Or if we, as artists, are more durable than our love.
Ben, I hope you wrote about your dead son
While you were tranced with pain,
Did not offer up those scenes of the infant Isaac in your mind
For the greater poem, but emerged from that swoon
Clutching a page some stranger might have written,
Like a condolence note, cursorily read and tossed aside.
Perhaps, at this extremity, nothing improves or worsens;
Talent irrelevant. There are no poems in stones.
For once, you do not watch yourself
At a desk, covering foolscap. Denied the shameful relief
Of actors, poets, nubile female creatures,
Who save tears like rain-water, for rinsing hair, and mirrors.
Finally, we are left alone with poems,
Children that we cling to, or relinquish
For their own sakes. The metaphor, like love,
Springs from the very separateness of things.
Leave a Reply