A poem, like Nietzsche’s version of marriage, is a conversation,
and its first line should catch fire for the reader
like a match on an oil leak but this one’s already at line four
and it’s all smoke, no flame and certainly no explosion.
nor does it, like some of its contemporaries, wish
to linger over the trout pulsing under the glistening water
in some al fresco venue which is always other and mostly better,
than the room where you, gentle reader, sit
as you read it. This poem does not swell with Orphean song.
It doesn’t study a city gutter. By this point, other poems
have been declared ideal, while this one
isn’t taking off, weighted down as it is by pre-owned
language, a vague sense of place, lack of impetus.
But perhaps I’ve picked the wrong end user—
not you, accidental reader—
but that other "you," the one I devise
while looking out some foreign window
at the washed blue horizon, the poplars,
the spongy dusk. They say we must write for ourselves.
Then, I’m the poem’s consumer
but that doesn’t seem right
because I’m always talking to the other—
not you of course, dear reader—
but the one I know is listening, being my mirror while I equivocate
on some rainy street in a zip code
you haven’t seen yet, or in years, somewhere far
from my home and yours and I’m contrite about that, reader—
that neither of us is an intimate of this poem.
I’m not in the literary conversation that surrounds it. You aren’t
wise to its romantic slang—
it’s all about him although we didn’t know that when we began
our shared journey and discovered only too late,
with our backs to this alien door,
without the key, while the problems of substance
summoned up earlier in the poem aren’t being solved by either of us—
dear reader, dear literary suitor—
and all we can do is write and read without hope of answers
or wisdom or, God help us, fire.  

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Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in Texas with her husband, David and her dog, Marcel Proust. Most recently her work has appeared in 2River View, Cider Press Review, Vol. 6, and Is This Forever, or What? Poems and Paintings from Texas, Greenwillow Books, 2004.
E-mail: wcarlisle at vidnet dot net  

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