On wanting to tear out this page because my writing, like so many of my reactions, is imperfect…….

                Well, he wrote a poem called “29,”or probably it didn’t have a name, and this editor said, “well, they go in this order,” and so they numbered everything, so now this poem wears a numbered badge like a title, unearned and  unasked.

                Well anyway, what I want to know is, how do poets like W. H. Auden have dreams in 1936 that look like my love life in 2011?

                “Our whisper woke no clocks, we

                kissed and I was glad

                at everything you did.”

                Which, okay, is kind of unremarkable because everyone who wants to only admit they’re normal talks about dreams like these.  Love is eternal, duh.  Unconstrained by temporality, limited only to the surfaces the lovers touch, waking and lighting new spaces only as they move. Like nymphs of the forest waking their homes to the stretching rays of the moon.  They are an island of light and sex and caress, the lovers, everything around them moving at a different speed, with muted colors and sounds.

                Everybody knows these images because they stole them from Auden and everybody else.

                But then:

                “I, submissive, felt

                unwanted and went out.”

                I read a line like that and the horror violins that make everything sound like murder are screeching across the vinyl grooves of the old love ballad.

                How did he know I was going to do that?

                He gave me the answer a few lines before, with that “worm of doubt.”

                It’s nothing short of a plague of locusts praying on poets and childish young women parading as writers.  But what a relief to know that it’s not my fault!  That when he, my own lover, so uncruel in his ignorance and innocence, strays from the script of perfect courtship I’m composing my head  I will show him nothing but the inkblots of my frown, my silence, my busy fingers, expecting proper interpretation.

                I spend so much time going out.

                Oh, but now I know that my body is still mine.  Someone’s told me the truth.  That’s all there is, to beat this infestation, to boil out all the mites, to poison any little parasite.

                That’s all I’ll have to do.

                But if they’ve been surviving, at least since 1936, how can I be sure I can?