When I Met My Muse
I glanced at her and took my glasses
off--they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. "I am your own
way of looking at things," she said. "When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation." And I took her hand.
William Stafford
For the young who want to
Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.
Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.
Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don't have a baby,
call you a bum.
The reason people want M.F.A.'s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else's mannerisms
is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you're certified a dentist.
The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.
Marge Piercy
Dear Poem
I haven’t written you in a long time.
A sudden window winks open.
The sky has my father’s
beaten face. I missed you. I missed how
you comforted me the way you
comfort me now with your wide-eyed
lucidity, the languor of the patient
unfurling of yourself, luxuriously
disregarding the latest betrayal
like a headline stark across the front
page of my face. But I will not
write about it here, along the margin
of your insides, although you are in love
with such unsung facts – the pearly whitehead
on my chin, that faint odour from my feet
scaling the air’s ladder into the previous line –
and why not? Who cares if someone else
would never believe that such things
may not also be poetic?
But now I want only to talk of you.
How many like you have I already
composed with such authentic chords
of truth, loud and clear within them.
My beloved one-night-stand
who never stops coming
to love me at all the right times:
after unbearable grief
or after every rare moment
of contentment, even joy.
You who never lie except when I
want you to, if only to augment a distant
but more vital truth. I love you,
dear poem. I love you
because you hold pain up upon
the quiet of your palm, raising it
so I might see it in the best possible light.
- Cyril Wong
