Here's another one to Laura.
At this point, she was writing me
and she was always putting me in this role situation, which
is hard, you know, when it's a student and a teacher.
But, I mean, we were friends.
And I was getting really annoyed because I
had to be the strong one and she was poor little old Laura.
And so she wrote me a poem in which
she was setting this up once again and this is a response.
As I was getting ready to write this poem,
I had been reading the New York Review of Books
and happened to cross a woodcut illustration for some article.
It was by Gauguin It was a woodcut
of a woman, which I'll describe in here.
And across the corner of the woodcut,
it says soyez mystérieux: be mysterious.
And so this poem is called Flood and that's
because on Laura's poem, it said-- it had a rubber stamp.
We did this rubber stamp exchange
as part of these poems, too.
And she was working for Fireman's Fund Insurance,
so she used a rubber stamp that said flood.
Her flood insurance, maybe, so I called this Flood.
Do you see the mysteries of making poems?
There's someone sometime in a panic in your mind.
You hide behind my hot indifference
which you imagine wearily to be conceptually
strong as celluloid intelligence.
But over here, where it's dark out, I'm just me.
Feeling uneasy in these nights cold and black,
I turn the heat up higher, thinking other people's lives
are warmer.
Suffer the suspicion I'm mediocre.
Remembering how Gauguin whispered, be mysterious,
into wood he cut it soyez mystérieux above the backside
of a female body lying perfectly voluptuous in mud or sleeping
was it?
As if pillowed and dreamy with her legs explicitly not there,
but held in darkness under wild waves
curling where his tool entered wood,
showing us his choice for her, impacted
in the prolonged watery beat, always sleeping face sideways
with flesh of body, soft, white, wanting
to nod out of what the next cut might reveal.
The message moves forward like a Ouija board with its own hands,
soyez mystérieux.
You get the joke.
Babyhood becomes us and is still yours for one night.
I offer it as evidence and then it's my turn.
Now you be the strong one, lady mama, queen somebody.
A slant, you appear in relief, but feel yourself moving out
of the old female sleep.
You hear the intellect of cells turning over.
Recognize in another's gaze a different subject,
not merely you and me, not even representational or seductive,
but hungry for breakfast under waking Pacific sky
and eager to swim out.
I want to turn this body over, show you her face awake
and askew, imperfectly ready to rewrite
the flood, nothing in the way, all of the body seen in motion.