So is the poet kept from fulfillment by touching
Upon customs that allow for completion
Only through madness, murder and rape
Or constant, various, faceless love.
As
yet I have not murdered or raped, though
I have written some subversive poems,
And as for the love as they say on T.V.,
Thank God for my wife and my friends.
So you can see how hard it is to get
Away. For a departure, I will address
My woman, for you are wives of this poem,
All of you: Woman, when you left me
This morning to go where you go, I never
Thought I'd sail so far before you got back.
I will leave this in the bedroom, and you
Will read it while I'm at sea. When you read it,
Forget the places I have passed, but listen
Where the torments break upon the shore
And spurt with the sweat of love through the last ditch
Of my dreams. For it is there that we must live.
Sidney Goldfarb
THE ANSWER
Loving as I do the nauseous moment
Before the green wave destroys itself,
When it
is
held upright only by my
Imploring glance through to its brown viscera,
How could I fail to answer
The same annihilating clarity in you,
Once having glimpsed behind your green irises
Something brown and vast heaving over?
Michael Fried
