What I'm Doing For Class

[akirlu]

We're reading postmodern poet Katarina Frostenson for my Swedish class. Quite unexpectedly, I wrote a poem in response.


On Reading Frostenson

Here we go again, Katarina, with your virgins and your unicorns –
The eternal maiden and her lost maiden’s head
Object of the male gaze
Object of a thousand desires
Object of strange verbs and unlikely similes

Always the metaphor and never the poet

A forgotten bride’s bouquet: hacked to pieces like the Dahlia, pulled apart
and strewn about, from one poem to the next, drained of blood,
so only the white shows – whites of their eyes, birch white, Snow White.

Don’t Shoot. You might not be the hunter. You can’t always tell.

Tell the tale, but never straight. What was that? Sound and fury? So five minutes ago.
“Write like a man,” but no straight shooter
You throw your curves: curved backs and foreheads, spavined allusions,
snaky sibilants and all the lost, aimless wandering between darkened boles, all along the river’s edge
where the faces look up, unseeing,

but in the end, Artemis must loose her quarrel
shoot straight, hit her target, or miss clean, Miss Clean, Miss Madonna so white,
just like that gaze, male or not, misses:
the point,
the person,
the Other self in you.

Look at the seesaw: did you see what I saw? Never. Not possible.
You saw. I see. We talk past each other, trying to be heard.
We stumble in the darkened wood, reaching outstretched hands.

If a poet falls in the forest, does anyone hear?

So what the hell?

Pull up your big girl pants. We’re all of us solitary,
Diogeni raising our moon lanterns high in search of the ones who will see us true.

No, me.

See ME.

The lens is there in your hand, and the camera doesn’t blink, but the image fades

All you get are these dizzy reflections
fractured glass,
pieced together with bloodless fingers.

O, for a tiger, burning bright, to hunt me that damnable unicorn,
O for a muse of fire, to light this murky path,
O for a barkentine, bark boat, birch white, to sail me home,
but all I have is words.
Words, words, words,
whole walls of them, and signifying nothing.