The Mother-Poets

The poets who are mothers know
the menace of the everyday:
ritual cleansings of the soul
that strip the stuff of dreams away...

Before the infant's opening cry
the garden crooks its jeweled claw
inviting neat apostrophes,
urging a path more traveled by.

Seductions of tetrameter
entice her as a husband might,
familiar as cheap champagne
toasting some anniversary night...

Unwelcome in her private zone
of coffee and the morning news,
these visitations of the muse
are maddening as the telephone.

The kitchen clock drums in a beat
that smacks of Auden in his prime
when deserts sang between the sheets
and cupboards knocked in four-four time...

So, Auden was a mother, too
in everything the word implies:
delivered of soliloquies,
there were the pots and pans to do.

John Lennon in his apron-strings
did little jobs about the flat –
polishing lyrics with the spoons –
quiet, but hardly desperate.

Sexton and Dickinson and Plath
indulged in secret metaphors;
this vice that kept them from their chores
was, in the end, their epitaph.


...Now
Let the stand-up poets preen
and posture in the magazines;
the mother-poets draft their wills
onto the backs of grocery bills,
building ephemera to last...
another
simple
household
task

01/20/2008

Posted on 01/20/2008
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