Tom--
I can see where this poem might come off as mediocre--it is very plain spoken and its skill is very hidden. Nor is the subject grand and high-flown, but very much down to earth. I posted it partly for those qualities. But I can see that it might "underwhelm" on a first read. It's the sort of thing that looks easy and is not.
AE--
Thanks so much for posting these, two favorites. I had wanted to post Dressmaker's Dummy, but the formatting seemed daunting. We will just have to refer folks to the original for its shapeliness on the page.
A prose poem that I think hilarious. But then, it is one of my favorite myths:
Orpheus Opens His Morning Mail
Bills, Bills. From the mapmakers of hell, the repairers of fractured lutes, the bribed judges of musical contests.
A note addressed to my wife, marked: Please Forward.
A group photograph, signed: Your Admirers. In their faces a certain sameness, as if "I" might, after all, be raised to some modest power; likewise in their costumes, at once transparent and identitical, like those of young ladies at some debauched seminary. Already--such is my vice--I imagine the rooms into which they must once have locked themselves to read my work: those barren cells, beds ostentatiously unmade; the sngle pinched chrysanthemum, memorializing in a corner some withered event, the mullioned panes, high up, through which may be spied, far off, the shorn hedge behind which a pimply tomorrow crouches, exposing himself. O lassitudes!
Finally, an invitation to attend certain rites to be celebrated, come equinox, on the river bank. I am to be guest of honor. As always, I rehearse the scene in advance: the dark, the hired guards, tipsy as usual, sonorously snoring; a rustling, suddenly, among the reeds; the fitful illumination of ankles, whitely flashing. . . Afterwards, I shall probably be asked to recite my poems. But O my visions, my vertigoes! Have I imagined it only, the perverse gentility of their shrieks?
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