One of my poems, The Soul’s Landscape, likens the relationship between the soul and the body to that of a marriage, with the soul pursuing the body, to create a self. The poem’s metaphor applies with equal force to poetry, to the relationship between the text and the body of the poem.
The Soul’s Landscape
Ah, what the soul gives for shape –
to be handled head-first
at the temple, to be cumbered
with cotton, white puffs
from plantations in heat; what it gives,
for the flick, flick elastic
on wrists, loose-leaf palms it befriends,
at its youngest – for the sake
of all this, and this place.
Love me now with your
hands (says the soul, half-exploring its
landscape), better me
with embodiment; come, angle the ribs
where they beach into
longing; come, finger the oval description
of death, smallest hope
for cessation. When the room is redundant
of space, and its walls
wish for closure, thumb my corners
up, inward, wade your lips
through the ridge where they meet,
to allow recollection.
I must love with the tissue and the gloss
that embody: cellule, elegy,
ghost, danger, languish… all those words
out of context for souls,
god-forsaken, whiplash of the neck –
Interim
is the word I would use the most cautiously;
how precarious its hum,
ear to earth, plumbing earth, earthwise.
From: A Commerce of Moments
Pavement Saw Press, Ohio, 2003
First published in Pavement Saw Magazine
(Comment excerpted from http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2005/08/sofia-m.html)
