East coasting or make it beautiful a radio bio poem.

A Geraldine Elizabeth Clarke (1939-2000)

Art ... is an inescapable burden of Beauty ... Niesen.

Cast

Poet Confessional Black-brown

Muse Spiritual Brown-black Host Authoritative Radio shade Musician Philosophical Jazz tints

Act I.

The scene:

The Poet, brown-black, aged 44, appears in mod motley." His suit and cap are both crushed indigo velvet, his shirt is medieval finery, and a thick, rainbow-coloured scarf girds his neck. His circle-lenses glasses are gold rimmed. He carries a pedlar's leather bag slung over his back, and from it protrudes papers-sheaves of poems-along with a few fresh lowers and a rum bottle. A teapot dangles from the bottom of the bag. In one hand, the Poet bears an open book and, in the other, an alder wood staff His demeanour shifts in accord with his memories. The set includes a bar stool a vase jetting sunflowers, a rocking chair, an acoustic guitar, an inkwell, a fountain pen and paper, a typewriter on a table, a bookcase filled with books and bottles, an antique desk and antiquarian desk-lamp, a mirror, a photo album, a battered suitcase, an old, 1960s-era portable record player, an old-fashioned microphone and stand, plus a radio. According to his reminiscences, the Poet moves among these furnishings and uses them accordingly. From time to time, he sings duets with his Muse, a black-brown woman, who is his always glamorous interlocutor. The Lighting may shift according to mood, while the Poet may freely gesticulate, sit, pace, 'stand and deliver,' or try out his typewriter, microphone, rum, photo album, writing objects, suitcase, guitar, radio, teapot (and cups), lamp, mirror, flowers, and music. Save for the specific, indicated songs, however, the music fuses jazz-blues-gospel, tinted indigo by Nova Scotian moodiness. Lighting may be safely blue, gold, and ivory. The painting composing one wall in Moonscape, by William Lloyd Clarke, which boasts a yellow moon embossed upon indigo. The play begins when the Host enters the set and approaches the microphone.

   l

   Poet: Admirable Pound, always primary,
   Defers to Chinese in Canto LIII, quoting,
   "MAKE IT NEW, " while Malcolm X,
   Bade his hosts always do a simple intro,
   Telling them to "Make it plain."
   I concur, but prefer, in my native,
   Black, Nouvelle-Ecosse brogue,
   This declaration, "MAKE IT BEAUTIFUL,"
   As my ars poetica, what comes
   Natural cos it be what ma mama,
   Geraldine Clarke, practiced too, choosing
   Beautiful shoes to cajole and coddle
   One rickety foot, plus gorgeous Sunday hats,
   To announce to all and sundry,
   "I am more than your equal. "
   But I only became a poet when I critiqued

   Her exploding marriage, and she sighed,

   Muse: "Oh George, how could you write that?

   Poet. That was twenty years ago, twenty years
   Since Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues
   Debuted my primary primitivism.

   1i

   Poet: I begin where Peter Dale Scott begins
   Listening to the Candle, precisely

   In Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963.

   Besides, I also adore Her Excellency,

   Madame Clarkson, to whom Scott tunes

   And attunes his lyric. And why not?

   The Right Horourable Governor-General

   Is smartly chic, always in fashion,

   Just like on that aftemoon my stylish

   Mother vacuumed, and I eyed this woman,
   So like my mom, bronze-beige brunette,
   Elegant, enlightening CBC's Take 30,
   With Paul Soles, dazzling the television,
   That afternoon when I was three,
   A crisp, nippy Friday, and not watching,
   On the black fringe of whites-only Halifax,
   The augustly golden, chivalrous leaves
   Dying, when a pale babysitter-neighbour,
   Peremptorily adult, ran zigzagging, huggard,

   In ranting, raging sunlight, gagging,

   "The .President's been shot."

   Audio: A clip announces the President's demise.

   Poet: And I stood in a doorway looking out,
   While gripping my mother's long skirt,
   Her right palm lightly warm on my head,
   And the very air turned hard, shiny gold,
   While the cold globe spun toward darkness.
   How could I sleep easy again?

   lii

   Poet. News was always ancient in that Hell

   Called Halifax, nothing new below its Citadel

   As if slavery only ended yesterday,

   And so, I'm four, shooting marbles outdoors,
   With my two brothers, younger,
   Just up the sloping Bay Road from Halifax,
   When three white boys, Grade School age,

   Began chucking rocks at us three tan boys,

   Began pitching rocks and that word, "Niggers!"

   That felt rock-hard, so we hurled it back,
   Called em white boys "Niggers!"
   Innocence is like that, just too innocent.
   Then, Daddy emerged, shooed the white boys off,
   Summoned us sons indoors,
   Where I feared he'd lick us for picking up this shabby
   New word stinking of bad news. No,
   He moored us before a looming mirror,
   Uncupboarded two bowls of sugar,
   Said, "School yourselves in this mirror:

   You're brown-just like this brown sugar.

   Those schoolboys are like this white sugar:

   Some white sugar people don't like

   Brown sugar people like us."

   Muse: Us smokingly gold, Black Mi'kmaqs, Africadians

   Iv

   Poet: As a boy, I aspired to be a brainy ace,
   Concocting T.N. T. with chemistry sets,
   Erecting empires with stamp collections,
   Sporting a long, black scarf like Richthofen,

   The Red Baron and splashing vegetable oil

   And blue food colouring on poor-ass bullies.

   My report cards were gold-star excellent,
   Due to my parents' exertions and Alexa
   McDonough, my kindergarten teacher,

   And so I ascended through grade school

   Like a kite, scoring first prizes,

   While my parents struggled for human rights.

   Then, when I was ten, Sheena liked me,

   And I liked Susan D., who was like

   My mother in her porcelain cream and black,

   That is to say, Anne Frankish creaminess,
   With Turkish-dark eyes and hair.
   For two sweet years we chased each other,

   Laughing, around the block, so that

   Her folks asked me one day if I thought

   It okay for coloureds and whites to marry.

   I said, "Yes." Their faces bled, then flushed.
   But, suddenly, Susan was twelve, and, one
   Sunday I came calling, she was wearing
   Her first real nylons and first serious bra,

   Fresh from church and a pain smote me,

   Spying her unmarriageable beauty.

   v

   Poet: Turning black and black

   In high school, while sipping Manischewitz

   Concorde Wine, the same indigo grape dark-blue

   As the cover of Louis Dudek's anthology,

   Poetry of Our Time, whose Pound picks

   Include "The river-Merchant's Wife:

   A Letter," I heard the lyric as Ma Rainey
   Sugared by Yeats, some Yangtze delta blues:

   Li Po's thousand-year-old song as new radio:

   Muse: "Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back."

   Poet: I craved to wail hurtful blues like that,

   Imagining myself, at 16, a poet,
   Skinny, buck-toothed, black boy, native son
   Of Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia,

   Craving to be intellectually sensual,

   To impress auditors with my authentic pains,
   Blending Bob Dylan and Otis Redding, eh?
   What I desired: To versify Three Mile Plains's
   Gypsum quarry slain and its apple blossom belles.
   So there, babying a radio, I inked
   My first poem seriously a true poem,

   "Watercolour for Negro Expatriates in France,"
   Written while 1978 became 1979,
   Making me a poet-overnight.

   vi

   The Poet concentrates his attention on the Muse.

   Poet: At 17, avid, I netted une Acadienne-Irish-named
   for language camouflage.
   Blonde, green-eyed, artsy, and just as avid,
   Her morals descended from Janis Joplin.

   But she was ready for James Brown,

   Just as I was ready for Joni Mitchell.

   An I knew her nakedness could startle stars,
   Her yellow hair so silvery some nights,
   It was a Niagara of miniature suns,
   Muse: along the French Shore, where we lushly kissed,
   Stewing in our gushing youth, juicing,
   And lollygagging on beaches, then slurping wine.
   Poet: I could rest neath the summer of her hair,

   Get inferno comfy under steamy stars,

   Watch white surf cresting black water-Like
   Othello and Desdemona consummated....

   And weren't we, ah, like that dicey couple,

   That naive? Despite my words and her art?

   vii

   Poet. In Queen Elizabeth High's English class,

   While snow colonized air, I annexed
   A Malcolm X text, becoming soulful, funky,

   A no-bullshit, alleyway, haiku graffiti poet,
   Reading LeRoi Jones's Dutchman and thinking

   I' like his bourgeois hero, Clay, who mentions

   Dudes draping overcoats over their arms
   To refrain from axing pale, reedy throats.

   Then, I found an apple blossom Eden,

   The Annapolis Valley, oasis of dandelion wine-

   And brown girls, bronze girls, black girls,

   Muse: Ready to eye and get eyed in return.

   Poet. So riding with Enus to Weymouth Falls,

   In a blizzarding, black October of 1978
   When Jonestown was dying,
   Audio: Clip of news report of the mass suicide.

   Poet: I could enjoy a delicious, quilted sleep,

   Then fall, as soon as I awoke, in love

   With a caramel-sweet, pepper-freckled,

   Shy crooner of Nashville sonnets,
   Her voice so smoky and scratchy and honeyed,

   She had to be poetess Shelley, and she was....

   viii

   Audio. Clip of Trudeau announcing his defeat in May 1979.

   Poet: When Trudeau tottered, then crashed, dragged
   Down by inflation fatigue and disco malaise,

   I vamoosed from Marxist-Leninist Montreal

   That Maoist-Trotskyist house, with only
   The vision of one Shelleyan kiss to infuse

   That lyric scribbled between prole cigar fumes

   And a billion New Brunswick potholes,
   "Love Poem/Song Regarding Weymouth Falls."
   Then, rippling down the Annapolis Valley, I came,
   Following the sinuous, hyaline river,
   Eyeing white clouds on its surface,
   White sheep on its slopes,
   But found Shelley now conservatively non-committal.
   Injured, I tramped miles and miles
   Under chilling stars, until a Liberal Party
   Fiddler, hot from a big county shindig,
   Drove me drearily to Digby,
   And I never saw Shelley clearly again.
   After the apple blossoms faltered, fell,
   I trekked again that Valley, plucked,
   A barefoot, auburn nymph, hickory-scented
   With cigarettes and Tia Maria, who serenaded,
   With flesh, her Black Panther Yeats.
   A month of drizzly, sultry nights, we clutched
   Each other or I cradled a typewriter,

   While she, in silver panties, read Huckleberry Finn

   And took busy drags off her Players A.

   Muse: What an occult coupling: Aquarius and Leo!

   But you called her "Babe, "imagined a cabin,

   Plus kids, with her, in "Sunflower County."

   ix

   Poet: Supposed to be like Peaches n Herb-

   Muse: 'Reunited and it feels so good'

   Poet: Babe and I sundered with distance,

   In black dawn, I slid from her icy house,

   My wine-skin smoking with Tia Maria.

   To ship to Upper Canada and its Waterloo,
   Then skip, slip, trip into English Co-Op,
   Then Toronto's Sheppard Subway Station,
   To control traffic signals via computer,
   With immunity from lawyers,

   In case I fouled up a million drivers-

   By pressing buttons I didn't understand.

   Now 21, I sent manic notes to a classmate,
   Half-Chinese, part-black, purely Jamaican,
   With a Spanish-French-German-English name,
   So Trudeauvian bilingual, multicultural,

   Her bee-stung lips set off her wasp waist-

   Like a match flame sets off dynamite.

   Soon, we kissed in secret places, dodging gossip.

   But she took Ideals, a Christian zine,

   Thus made Universite Laval her nunnery.

   Muse: So you lyricized French, your kisses all tongue,
   Sank in her province like a lover,
   Your spines melting, your organs glittering.
   Poet: I scribbled more letters, letters upon letters,

   Letters, letters, letters, letters, letters:

   But her eyes incinerated my letters.

   x

   Poet: My Honours B.A. in English didn't
   Reflect three weeks hitchhiking the West,

   Nor six weeks inking blues in Banff,

   Nor swallowing Scotch, much too much,
   Nor my eight months amok in Queen's Park,
   Ripping parchment to mock up
   Algoma-Manitoulin's voting history,
   Nor did it record Elections Ontario nights

   In spooky, Gothic, ex-T.O. morgue,

   When Scott Thompson, guard and actor,

   Opened the doors at midnight so I could type

   Deadly poems on an IBM Selectric.

   Audio: A few "bars" of vintage IBM Selectric typewriter action.

   Poet: Graduating, at twenty-four, I got elected
   Student newspaper editor for one year.

   It entailed a different liqueur every week,

   But I had nursing and solace via Wai See,

   Hong Kong Chinoise, whose black-lacquer hair,

   Gleaming, concentrated astonishing stars.

   Deadlines met, it was back to Halifax-

   Its cold white faces saying "No!"-

   While Wai See flew back to H.K., and I flew

   To London, Amsterdam, Paris, gargoyled Paris,

   Its midnight lights igniting the Seine

   While 10% alcohol beer inflamed my brain.

   Landed in Halifax again, I was hired
   A black provincial social worker,

   Then saw Shelley's brother's shotgun slaying

   In an obituary. I wheeled to Weymouth Falls
   To help oppose regular injustice,

   But I also plagiarized backwooks, black talk.

It was this poet's civic duty to rebuke The government of Nova Scotia, Its Cro-Magnon and satanic Tories.

So that the Weymouth Falls Justice Committee Could face the Attorney-General.

And bid me cuss out that pasty-faced bastard 

In official African-Nova Scotian English,

The honest speech Valley Africadian

Learned me to compose.

Act II

The Scene:

The set is precisely the same as in Act I. But the Poet's dress is different. He is now wearing a black silk suit with a collarless white cotton shirt. His black shoes are handmade by Philamain of Sherbrooke, Quebec. When necessary, he must don a cape. The Muse is, as usual scintillatingly glamorous, electrifyingly chic.

   Poet. No authentic social worker, I shucked

   Social struggle for strict schooling,

   Going to Dal, for an M.A. in Poetry.

   My tutor was that freeing genius, John Fraser-Cambridgian,
   splatter-flick Shakespearean--Who
   snapped J.F.K. up close in innocent,
   1960, the Rat year I was born.

   In a house volcanic with talk, Fraser nodded

   At capital ideas, frowned at screwy ones.

   That Baudelaire essay he demanded I write

   Was damnable, damnable! But I learned more

   About poetry than ever I had before.

   Next, I started a funky, punk tabloid, The Rap:

   Eight pages a month of jazzy scandals.

   Mark Daye and I scooped the Halifax dailies,

   Used our ad revenue to buy beer, then got

   Noticed by Howard D. McCurdy, M.P.,

   Ex-biology prof from Windsor. Ontario,

   Now snazzy Opposition star foe
   Of the hellish sleaze and treason

   Unleashed by Mulroney's circus of devils.

   Audio: Clip of Howard McCurdy speaking.

   Poet: Howard-Tony, black rhetorician-summoned me
   And I locomotived to Ottawa.

   After staring at newsprint like a wanted man.

   Muse: After Wai See returned from Hong Kong,

   After she flew all the way back to Halifax,

   After she returned from Hong Kong.

   ii

   Poet: It's true: I got married on Halloween,

   Though Howard advised against it,

   But I was scared to be twenty-seven,

   An age that takes four syllables to pronounce.

   So I wed a good person

   I later served dishonourably....

   We slid along Ottawa's icy promenades,
   Hollering "Cheerio" to the parliamentary guards,
   And I siphoned Howard' cache of Scotch

   Replacing it off and on, and reading Pound
   While hearing Coltrane's "My Favourite Things."

   Then I flew to Windsor to fight Free Trade

   For forty-nine days in 1988,

   So that Howard trounced the tricky Grits

   Because our patriotism was honest.

   Audio: Clip of Federal Election victory announcement.

   Quick, I yelled, "Run, Howard! Run for the NDP
   Leadership," and he did, running smack

   Into pastel racialism and a fiasco election

   That chose a weak leader for weaker reasons.
   But there was nothing to be done

   But a doctorate in English at Queen's U,

   So to Kingston I went, with Whylah Falls

   Coming out, my marriage coming undone,

   Because of my vows, broken-or left undone.

   iii

   Poet: My dissertation paired English Canadians
   With African Americans, arguing an anathema:

   Their schools of poetry are similar.

   The idea made chalk citoyens blush and bluster.

   Thus, only grand Duke University
   Of Durham, North Carolina, engaged me,

   Instantly upon my convocation,
   So I was repatriated to the Republic--Land
   of my mothers, home of my fathers,
   Afro-America. Soon, Caucasian Canucks
   Asked me, on my sorties home,

   Muse: "How can you tolerate the South's racism?"

   Poet: I'd laugh and answer. "It's easy.
   I grew up in Halifax."

   But Malcolm X was only one hero,

   Another was Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

   Amid dogwood and magnolia blossoms,

   I mourned my missing, native apple blossoms.

   So I jetted to-and-fro our Gothic Kingdom-Vancouver,

   Toronto, Montreal, Quebec, Halifax--Scrutinizing

   all as a mutinous ex-pat.

   For the Yanks made Freedom a fleshly, graspable

   Treasure, a thing tangible and delicious,

   Not suspect, as it is in Canada: Pity.

   Saved, I studied Sade and Shelley, then scribed,

   With James Rolfe, Beatrice Chancy, an opera

   Americano-fierce, just like Blue would be.

   iv

   Audio: Clip of news report on Hurricane Fran-caused damage.

   Poet: Hurricane Fran, September '96, killed my power

   Five days, so I plugged in my Mac

   At Duke's Canadian Studies Center.

   That's how I met an Indo-Mauritian scholar
   Of 18th-century French erotica,
   And two years later, we married,
   And honeymooned in Venice,
   Where I sat by Pound's grave on Cimitero,
   Then caught a train to Bellagio
   At a six-degrees-separated Rockefeller guest

   Among other artists and, to quote Peter Scott,

   Muse: " ... the scholars
   rattling their teacups
   back in the Villa Serbelloni ... "

   Poet: There drinking limoncello

   Or Negronis-that fusion of Campari,
   Gin, and Martini Rossi red Vermouth,
   Muse: "slightly inebriating
   like the terraced vineyards
   of the Villa Serbelloni
   above the richly towered lake"

   Poet: Como, Scott means, across from Cadenabbia.

   After ransacking the collage of a library,

   I lounged in sunlight to write Getta this poem.

   v

   Poet: No longer nervous about America,
   Save for its loud-mouthed, lethal diplomacy,

   But not wanting to turn 40 in the U.S.,
   Not wanting to see in 2000 in the U.S.,
   I arrived at the University of Toronto
   In 1999, to teach African-Can Lit,

   And travelled to Fredericton to research
   The hangings of my cousins,
   George and Rufus Hamilton, in '49,
   For the hammer murder of a cabby.
   Angered by their crime and their calamity,
   I drafted Execution Poems in two weeks

   And Gaspereau Press sentenced it
   As a big, black book, a folio, two-feet long,
   One-foot wide. It sold instantly

   In centuries, and was hailed, then honoured
   With a Governor-General's Award--
   Even if my name was mud, black ink crud,
   Among the jealous poets of the East,
   Snow and tears marring their crabby, spiteful faces,
   In the dark, icy drizzle of destructive autumn.

   Vi

   Poet: Decades after first imbibing her screen
   Image, royal jubilee it was to meet

   Her Excellency the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson,

   And His Excellency John Ralston Saul,
   To sample Cape Breton Scotch, delectable,
   In the gaudy room with a ceiling like a tent,

   After reciting Pound's "River Merchant's Wife"
   To laurel now-deceased Louis Dudek,

   Before an applauding audience of laureates

   And Mistah Griffin, who, wowed and joyous,
   Shouted, "You read my favourite poem!"
   Then, a disappointed, annoying reporter,
   Dissipated and noisy, queried, crassly,

   Muse: 'What will you do with the prize money?'

   Poet: Well, yes, she was a laughable louse

   In truth, I bought land in Three Mile Plains,
   Down in always floral Africadia,
   Just three-fourths of an acre, perfumed
   By vivid apple trees, spruce, and pines.
   Near Maplewood Cemetery where lies
   My mother under white marble stone.

   Her name inked in black ink letters,

   And where I've plotted to be placed,

   Once my last words are an epitaph

   The Muse now songs, mournfully, soulfully, the hymn, "Pass Me Not,"
   in the style of the North Preston Baptist Youth Fellowship.

   Vii

   Poet: Soon, Dr. Ajay Heble commissioned

   An opera for his Guelph Jazz Festival,

   A soul jazz opera with South Asian accents.

   And D.D. Jackson, of Ottawa and Brooklyn,
   Inked Quebecite, gilding Quebec City's romance--And
   that epoch when une fille met me

   Late night at the train station in Levis,

   And we clambered L'escalier casse-cou,

   Leaving only music behind us.

   The Muse approaches the Poet who is putting a record on a stereo.
   She smiles.

   Muse: It's a terrific irony men invented

   The Hi-Fi, I mean, high fidelity,

   For, just as in high finance, they got no fidelity.

   The Poet turns on the phonograph and smiles at the Muse.

Act III

The Scene:

The Poet is now garbed in a white muslin robe, sports a full trim beard, and wears brown leather sandals. He once again carries an alder wood cane. The Muse is always the Muse, womanly, regal, shimmering. During their duets, the twin may embrace or simply or simply eye each other. When the Muse sings alone, she may either regard or disregard the Poet, who must always watch her, piningly, always. At times, when the Muse sings, there may be apple blossoms in the air. When necessary, she must sit before a piano, languorously, voluptuously-as if in love.

   I

   Poet: Geta and I reside in East End Toronto,

   In the ex-Eden of East York,

   Near Little India's Beaches, near Nova Scotia

   She teaches French, wisdom, patience, truth.

   I teach English but don't know how,

   And I compose to stave off decomposition.

   I pick up Violette Leduc and read in her light-
   The extreme, blinding genius of La Batarde--
   The black truth I've written nothing-Nothing!-Unless
   you disagree.

   Muse: I must disagree. What you compose

   Is song shouting from the page.

   Poet: And what about my soul?

   Do I have any faith?

   Muse: Aye, it's Nava Scotian African Baptist. ...

   ii

   Poet: Aged 44 in 2004, I must demand,

   Muse: "What do I bring to Poetry?"

   Poet: Out of grisly, bloody, Haligonian streets,

   Out of apple blossom, apple wine, Three Mile Plains,
   Out of my father's oils executed on glass,
   Out of existential ballads of lovelorn angst,
   Out of parliamentary rhetoric, sometimes drunken,

   Out of professorial jargon and Southern slurs,

   Out of the immortal Scofield Reference Bible,
   Out of the Halifax North End Memorial Library,
   Out of the Library of Parliament,
   Out of talks at Harvard and the Sorbonne, well, I bring

   Musician 1: "Oral-based visionary writing," (Ron Foley MacDonald)

   Musician 2: "Vernacular formalism," (Kevin McNeilly)

   Musician 3: "Polyphonic poetics," (Jon Paul Fiorentino)

   Poet: A profuse miscellany, verbose, yes,
   But singing, singing,
   A soundtrack of echoes,

   Blues effects in black ink,

   An Israel of chants,

   A Palestine of rap.

   I bring pell-mell brouhaha, gut-bucket

   Pandemonium, gospel palaver,

   Jabberwocky, saltwater Negro yinkyank,

   Muse: Epiphanies of et cetera, et cetera,

   Phallic symbol exclamation points, verse

   Fluting in cadence-or with vengeance!

   iii

   Poet: A seventh-generation black singer from the provinces-

   Les families blanches provinces--I

   I am party to, poet to, the supreme, majestic

   Maritimes: Portia White, Neslson, Symonds,
   Bucky Adams, Linda Carvery, Harvey Millar,
   Measha Bruggergosman, Jeremiah Sparks,

   Delvina Bernard, Gary Beals, Faith Nolan, Joe Sealy,
   And the Nova Scotia Mass Choir ...

   Muse: Brother, sister, have you heard them?

   Audio: A brief medley of some of the above.

   Poet: My lived history is acoustic, atavistic blues,
   Dylan Thomas delirium tremens in verse
   Pseudo-zoological aping of ye olde "Great Poets,"

   Muse: Halifax slum-projects where rats tangoed

   Across Ouija boards to rat out fake lovers,

   Finally a Toronto of saris, patties, and martinis.

   Poet: And all that is left is to sup on alcohol

   Then fall blunt upon the Muse, her softness,

   Muse: Like any supercilious bastard,

   Poet: Believing intellect makes poetry of every orgasm,

   To revive Irving Layton, and ask, with Pound,

   Muse: 'Hast thou found a nest softer than cunnus
   Or hast thou found better rest....?'

   Poet: Yeah, I crave the endless, holy feminine--Cream
   Caramel, sea wash, molasses,

   Pale sprays of blossoms, apple blossoms, Poetry.

   Sou'Easterly bards, must I die inaudibly
   Like John Thompson, Alden Nowlan, Milton Acorn?

   Nah, I'll have my Church-and Woman!-good God!

   Iv

   Poet: Here, on the bleakest edge of History,
   I was fashioned-like you-by desperation,
   A sire's hands on a siren's breasts,

   And when I felt a burning body
   Pressing against mine,

   It was really just my hot shame.

   And all my lovers left me
   Cut to the bone, which is okay:

   I had no heart to start with.

   So small a thing is Poetry, this verse-

   The messy syllables of meaning:

   Nothing's so ruthless as rueful verse.

   Yet, though it hurts sometimes to sing,

   I lift my voice to the residue of stars,
   This chilly dew refreshing my face,

   And tumble each vowel and consonant in line,
   Because there's vodka and Rain in the fridge,
   Another sheaf of lies ready to be typed,

   And I must be impeccably imperfect, impish,
   Taking Calvados and taking of rhyme,
   Having come through mixed-up ceremonies of love,

   Knowing that our mortality

   Is born from our desire for Beauty,

   As is Poetry, as is Poetry.

   Muse & Poet: There is birth, then death, then judgement.
   What is Life but your fluttering breath?
   Look back! Look back! The grave lies before you!

   The Muse and the Poet exit, hand-in-hand.