 |
|
| |
| When Anger is an Idol I Lose |  | |  | |
by Cynthia Kraman | |
I wanted God, God wanted me; we played
The azure was a great expanse of bliss
In those hard arms I whimpered with delight
And day shook all my anger out of me
And then the night came at me, sliding close
Where lack of God had left a hermit’s hole
It ate and drank, and made me drink and meat
God smelled of you. The heavy sweat of love
Came endlessly. The kisses were alike.
The grabbing airless hope all had your name
Embroidered on its heaving, emblemed form
The wants were yours, the having and the lack
Stitched evenly in letters spelling: NAUGHT
And others spelling: NIGHT IS LIVING HERE
Now night, now anger, turn me on their spit
Until I see both you and God again
Me praying, me professing, walking, still
Me in the Natural History Museum
A tour guide for postmodern months and years
Me waiting for the message on the screen
To say “FORGIVEN” in a steady light
The Sluts of Delft
The great imaginary spaces that they built
Those painters of the early school of Delft
Made emptiness the deity and placed
A pissing dog, a sucking child and nurse
As emblems of the damned organic life
Like fisheyes at the foot of marble walls
So small, so insignificant, alive
The bad hot girls of Delft had visitors
In small hot rooms made warm by silk and fur
Upon their bluish breasts so lightly flushed
Reflected in the Venus pearls they wear
In each recumbent tender tinted ear.
Their glassy eyes bend silently on space
Their pearly teeth part tenderly in smiles
How often is it inward, this bought flesh
When painted by Vermeer or by de Hooch
Two masters not of light or space or line
But of the flight of what is flesh and love
Into these girls who hold the only hint
Of an imagination filled with more
Than snarling spaniels, hunger, empty space
|
Cynthia Kraman is the author of three books of poetry including her
recently reissued first volume Taking on The Local Color (Wesleyan UP).
This year a short memoir of her rock years in Seattle appeared in Open
City #23; Prose by Poets, and she was anthologised in Bowery Women
Poets. She is also a professor and a medievalist publishing on Chaucer and the Pearl-poet.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
