[A Poem in Two Languages]
You get to a certain age and you begin to feel as if the soul (that’s me) were imprisoned in the body (that’s IT) like a canary in a birdcage or a light bulb within its hot silk shade.
The soul is a domesticated animus, doomed to gaze ruefully upon the body’s hopeless—even comic—inability to join it in their former oneness. I used to be as integrated as a lighthouse. Now when I write poetry—though it would be more accurate to call it “making marks with words”—I use both hands at the keyboard, writing soul-based language with my left hand and body-built words with my right. It sounds as if I’m continually translating myself.
The left-handed poem I wrote yesterday looked like chalky runes scored on a blackboard. My right handed poem looked like a building on fire. I feel it would kill me if they were ever elided and forced roughly together.
