Jennifer Moxley

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No Water for Lyric Poets!

for Sara Nicholson

While you, Sara Nicholson, have been
polishing your good shoes, getting ready
to be mortified upon a broad plain,
(more commonly known as an “on campus visit”),
I have returned to the Aesthetic Movement.
A perverse response to our moment’s
updated version of putting artists on trial.
When the last bookseller in this Podunk town
closed up shop, my love of books and bookish
people became all the more fanatical
and quixotic, because I do not find it—
despite Oscar Wilde’s effete recommendation—
the least bit delightful to be left unsatisfied.

Though I doubt the languid titillation
of sweet reservatus was more than a fetish pose,
akin to cutting the pages of your Yellow Book Quarterly
in the carriage of a public train,
I can’t imagine it being adopted by
a woman artist. The Aesthetic Movement
had so few (beyond the incomparable
Charlotte Mew). But it doesn’t bother me.
I have rarely looked for mirrors in books.
I’d much rather be a gentleman
in my imagination than thumb
through dreary pages claiming to appeal
to the “female mind.” Minds used to be, like
everything else, exclusively gendered.
Which reminds me. I must thank you
for the gift of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s
verse tale Opus 7. I found the story of
that village termagant, Rebecca Random,
gardening at night to grow flowers so she
could make enough money to keep
herself in gin, as you elegantly wrote of
John Cowper Powys’ A Glastonbury Romance,
“totally bonkers.”

I think you’re the only poet I’ve recommended
that faux-sadistic mountebank to who has actually
bothered to read him. Most just nod their heads
and move on. Upon realizing you took my recommendation
I was struck by a tinge of possessiveness for
the singular author of Jobber Skald. What if others follow?
Nothing perplexes my sense of taste more
than a rise in popularity.

But back to Opus 7. I never thought I’d come across
a poem that dared rhyme Vogue with “disembogue,”
or “benumbs” and “chrysanthemums.” I mean really.
Of her heroine Warner writes: “as dreams convey
their own penumbra, so she pulled darkness after her.”
Or as Horace might say, “fix a limit to your dreams.
Envious people waste away when their neighbors thrive.”

Regardless of your academic posting, whether it be in the wood-lined
rooms of a smaller Ivy, or the cash-strapped cinder block
of your average State school, your genius is bound to be aroused
to cruelty by the bureaucratic boredom of our technological age,
the seven strings of your lyre gather dust while you fuss over rubrics,
outcomes, and learning platforms. At Brown I was served broken
Oreos on a paper plate, at Bard I swatted flies from soggy fries
when a Visiting Artist, while here at the humble
University of Maine there’s freshly cut sushi
and a state-of-the-art gymnasium. While the youth
spend excessive time tending and pampering their bodies
I waste my dwindling days nursing the notion
that I am a has-been. Like Horace I refuse to “approach
academic critics on their platforms to beg their support.”

But never mind. “The world is made by the singer
for the dreamer,” says Gilbert to Ernest in The Critic as Artist,
which I take to mean that Rebecca Random of Love Green
village will outlive us all, and Powys’s sexually charged
mystical novel about the grail will remain far more real
to me that the bright snowy vista that is at present
attempting to beguile me out of this bungalow
and into the silent backwoods.

I suppose I should confess that I’ve christened you
with the epithet “Dark and Strange”—an homage to
your impeccable negativity, which well-nigh crushed
the mood of that buoyant green girl you shared
a bill with. You truly know the value of imitatio,
and delight in a literary pas de deux. This gladdens me.
Mock it though you will, the western wind still blows
its ancient music through your ironic couplets.

If we didn’t live so far apart, and you could bear to eat salad
in the company of a poet more pewter than gold, I’d put
away the lipstick-stained white napkins and iron
my great-grandmother’s white linen tablecloth. I’d open
a bottle of expensive Bordeaux. No water for lyric poets!
Maybe then your tongue would let loose that wit
your pages are full of, and, by the warmth
of the gas insert, we might forget we are beholden
to institutions and—praying no one is recording—
give praise to the pages of Beauty and Truth.
.

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Hit or Miss

The human charm
to think a small
stuffed wedge,
in smiling guise
of pizza slice,
would please
a cat. Sewn by
someone struggling
somewhere
so in old age
a fragile thing
once boxed near icy
Christmastime
and left upon a road
to die could pass
her ebbing
indoor hours
at play in paper
with her slice.

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