"Poem with Horse and RB" [by Daniel Lawless]

This is the poem where no one drowns in summer
Or propranolol, gyves or sluices or falls in love with Sister Wendy.
No one pisses off a dock, no one is pixilated
Or doll-like, no one gets high and sticks up a bodega;
No one wakes this morning believing his or her life is like
The reassembled pieces of a torn up letter, nothing clots or tethers.
This is the poem where no one fingers
A violet scar on the back of a cowboy’s neck, no one pleasures
Herself in the rank nest of her father’s deer stand.
Nothing is pale, nothing shattered, nothing crevé or pálida.
This is the poem that does not collage, appropriate, ventriloquize
Frank O’Hara or holla,  that does not try to squeeze
Into the skinny jeans of erasures or pantoums.
This is the poem from which the ornate nomenclature of ornithology,
Minerology, cytomorphology and all the other ologies is absent
Together with the word “absent”; in which nothing scuds.  There are no tufts 
And the tin cans of romance remain undented.
This is the poem in which there are no apparently endless permutations
Of light and darkness, where constellations do not wheel
And sex is not like anything except perhaps a brief shriek down a forever
Recycling water slide.
This is the poem that does not invoke abstruse principles
Of particle physics to delineate certain properties of fifties hairdo’s,
Does not pretend to tap the phone lines of the dead
Or ingenuously indulge in the fantasy of the soul.
This is you’ll be glad to know the poem bereft of sun-spunk.
That does not keen the passing of passenger trains
Or Mr. Furman my fifth grade teacher.
This is the poem without scent, without footsteps.
In other words this is the poem that closes the door
And locks itself in behind it.
No castanets, no pie, no drones or luminescent,
No hickies  or Sweet Jesus, no animals whatsoever.
Well, maybe one. Because how strange, how cynical and impoverished
Would a poem have to be to refuse admittance to a horse,
And while we’re at it while he’s still around, say,
Good old Robert Bly to see it with such clear eyes,
The white flake of snow that that has just fallen on its mane?

from The American Journal of Poetry  Drawing of Daniel Lawless by Nin Andrews.

Comments

[Suzanne Lummis]

Oh yes, I do like this poem and I'm glad to encounter it again. This time I'm giving it serious consideration. I notice in the list of scorned elements, subjects, gestures, a few bits have been left out, left over, so I can work with those in future poems. However, I'll ignore the restriction on animals, and...hmm, a few other bits. Trains and footsteps, I need those, or I might. Oh. They're growing on me--trains, footsteps. So long since I've written about a train -- gosh, I was a kid. I mean, I was 24, but... Same thing. Also, I retain the right to use "shattered" -- m-a-y-b-e. But ya gotta be careful with "shattered," it's already so... Anyway. Scent, I won't forfeit that. In fact, I should return to a couple early poems and introduce scent. I will have scent in my next poem. I have too many unscented poems. Jasmine and burnt rice. No, another thing that's burning. What's burning? I hope something short of Everything.