2012/09/15

These Are the Poems of a Man Like Plato, She Said, Meaning Something I Did Not Comprehend but which Nevertheless Offended Me



Nap last night. He knows the sound of my car, or if not the sound of my car then the angle of my headlights as I pull to the curb, but however he knows it's me - and pang goes my heart - when I'm sixty feet from pulling my emergency break goodnight he runs up the sidewalk from the beneath the front porch of our next door neighbor's (where besides shelter is no doubt game, a blog friend recently tweeted of a feral rocks-off torturing a baby squirrel, they're cats, it's what they do).  >>Deleted bleggalgaze<< Hey! Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?





It's true! and the first guy in that commercial? he scored for Albania in a WCQ last week, he's so deep in St Benny of Olsen's doghouse he hasn't played for DCU in six, seven or more weeks. The fourth guy in the video is, even on his career's downhill slope, still United's key player and now he's injured, gone for the season. Anyway, home game tonight. Only two after this (unless they make the playoffs, which they might, who knows), one I know I'll miss in October, one a week from tomorrow I hope to be at but might miss because love elsewhere wins. It doesn't trouble me that love elsewhere wins though it troubles me my regret at missing games isn't greater, more oh-shit than oh-well, here, elsewhere (but not everywhere).










THESE POEMS, SHE SAID

Robert Bringhurst

These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study. These are the poems
of a man who would murder his mother to claim
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. These are the poems of a man
who would rather sleep with himself than with women,
she said. These are the poems of a man
with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s
hands, woven of water and logic
and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These
poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant
as elm leaves, which if they love love only
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said....
You are, he said,
beautiful.
That is not love, she said rightly.