Stage Fright

 

 

Poets and writers.

So the saying goes.

That is poets aren’t writers, but who—

 

Poets are poetry, writers are prose—

 

Prose can hold anything including poetry,

but in poetry there’s only room for poetry—

 

In keeping with the poster that announces it

with a fin-de-siècle flourish of its giant P

framed in a winged lyre’s strings

I shouldn’t simply walk in, I should fly—

 

And wouldn’t I be better off barefoot

to escape the clump and squeak

of cut-rate sneakers,

a clumsy ersatz angel—

 

If at least the dress were longer and more flowing

and the poems appeared not from a handbag but by sleight of hand,

dressed in their Sunday best from head to toe,

with bells on, ding to dong,

ab ab ba—

 

On the platform lurks a little table

suggesting séances, with gilded legs,

and on the little table smokes a little candlestick—

 

Which means

I’ve got to read by candlelight

what I wrote by the light of an ordinary bulb

to the typewriter’s tap tap tap—

 

Without worrying in advance

if it was poetry

and if so, what kind—

 

The kind in which prose is inappropriate

or the kind which is apropos in prose—

 

And what’s the difference,

seen now only in half-light

against a crimson curtain’s

purple fringe?