Injun Joe as an Avatar

The poetry’s arrested in his scene,

which can’t be trusted, because I saw it

through painkillers that softened my head,

after I’d asked him what Keats really meant:

“Was it a vision or a waking dream?”

—You think that really mattered much to him?

In my waking vision dream, there’s no glory,

no prize committee or dew-drip Paradise.

He’s in an attic nook, or dim garage,

or the cellar where he actually writes,

the space a sheeted granulated matter,

his silenced countenance and de-boned body

scabby with caked ash about to crust and crack,  

poems piled at his feet like shoeshine rags.

A grave purpled fraughtness colors him.

What damaged him to this silence?

He still writes and still isn’t heard, as if

not being heard is the whole point of it,

and who are these children, these waving

Halloween windsocks who won’t talk to him?

Beyond my busybody vision, he staggers

through divorce, stooped, bereft, still writing.

Spiky and singing, he out-writes them all,  

the cheered, spotless others—he howls

at their after-dinner-speaker poetry,

the monsignors, the suburbans, the woo-woo

wisdom merchants weeping to the bank.

Poetry’s a weather that doesn’t need

a specific place: it’s a storm outside a cellar,

sunshine at a bedroom window.

Too much schoolroom poisons the idiom.

Too much reverence stinks up the joint.

The sorrow hanging in the dreamy air

seems to confuse him, he can’t understand

how his heart came to hurt him like this,

confuses it with leaves blurted out by storms,

leaves that keep falling fast in the cellar,

in poems he writes, the base desires and rage,

he says the gods designed the set,

stage-manage things, scripted them,

the hilarity that hurts us is

that none of it really matters,  

that poetry’s griefs are intimates

           we don’t choose.  

                      They come to us, for us.

                               They cling to body and soul.