poem

Actress

I will wince to hear you say, "Should the devil
tempt you to good." Acting is all forward,
the motion of birds in flocks of ten or more;
It stops in its tracks to fall in providence

like Hamlet's sparrow. Because every devil
never leaves its stage, blessed with a forward
spot, and a hovering company sweating more
and more to be the last and kiss Providence

on its painted lips. You're like a lusty devil,
yet you are. Acting is inside the foreword
of a great novel, or how Shakespeare's moor
is first a name, then a skin, then a keen providence

for black men to dance on thrusts free from devil
costumes. I think of Olivier pushing his cart forward,
filled with many tins of shoe polish. The more
dark he winks, they say, the grander performance.

Oh, to speak to Emily Dickinson for just one minute. I'd tell her about the waves of critics content on disseminating over her dotted i's for the sake of Deconstruction and in search of the virtue lurking in autonomy.

What would the world have been like if Sylvia Plath decided that an adulterous Ted Hughes wasn't the end of the world? Probably a little less stereotypical of poets. I mean, there's a reason Plath is on a pedestal, and it ain't for the writing. She's good, yes, but Larkin is superb. Arnold is magnificent. Hardy was a god. There's a reason 'poet' is stated and Plath pops up. She cornered the market on angst-ridden cathartic shlock that composing poetry today is both pathetic and ironic.

"So you write about daddy hitting you?"

"Are you, like, going to kill yourself now?"

Where's the reward for the tough, who stick out real loss. Poets like Frost, who lost nearly his entire family in two years. Or Yeats, who pined after his love her entire life, Maud Gonne.