When I listen, I hear birds in the trees or cars going down the street or dogs barking or wind or rain or dry insect noises in dry fields.
When I look, I see clouds or bare tree limbs or red berries or sunlight on a wet parking lot or the neighbor's cat slinking down the sidewalk.
When I lick, I taste salt or honey or melting butter or bus exhaust or the metallic tang of a screen door or my wife's shoulder.
When I sniff, I smell lightning or burning leaves or coffee or curried rice or rain on pavement or bleach or rotting milk in the refrigerator.
When I touch, I feel running water or sand or gravel or a hot plate or a horse's mane or a satin bed sheet or the front of my own thigh.
When I stop listening and looking and licking and sniffing and touching, I pause in my education of who I am.
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Dear Ovid
My Latin teacher preferred we read Virgil, analyzing, word by word, the root derivations, the multiple ambiguities, the grammar, the significance of the inverted word order whose sounds imitated semantics of the periodic sentences that would spill out into the next line. Virgil taught how to abandon memorable quotes, unraveling instead an intricate and interconnected ricochet of meanings, pulling the reader’s eye down the page. When confronted with Dido, Aeneas enjoyed the affair but obeyed a higher calling to fulfill his destiny. Virgil taught stoic restraint and patriotic duty. We were a generation being educated to believe in and hold our government accountable for living up to our constitution.
You, however, taught love, the messiness of sexual abandon and emotional disorder, whether in a handbook that, like a farm manual, detailed all the positions, or in stories of lusty gods and nymphs, or in epistles written by mythic figures. Secretly I hid and slowly translated your version of Dido’s letter to Aeneas, far more brutal than anything Virgil could have imagined in his purity, and metrically far more facile, almost glib, in the smooth manner you handled those hexameter couplets. You could make Latin sing, and that’s quite a hard task to do.
Apparently you took the wrong side in Augustan family bickering, preferring his promiscuous daughter and her rebellious husband in their flawed coup d’etat. Banished for writing such dirty books, struggling to survive among barbarians who could not read or appreciate Latin, you wrote endless poetic letters pleading with successive emperors to let you back in. I understand what it must have felt to be banished from your native city, but, even had you returned, everything would have changed so much, all your friends disappeared or bankrupt, you would not have found comfort or joy anywhere. Lovers, like idealists, are bound to suffer disillusionment. Here’s what you could never have known: Shakespeare loved your work and stole from it liberally.
In death you made a great poet greater.
Sincerely,
Dr. Mike
[Disposable Prose Poem October 4, 2009]
Lovely. Publish this one
Is it even possible to stop?
Dr. M.: Poets die and life goes on.
Amy: I think I already did.
R.T.: Yes. But it goes by really fast.
Thanks to all of you for commenting.
H. K.
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