THE MOON AND STARS RAPIDLY ENTER YOU

Here is a typically twisty and weirdly beautiful poem from my husband’s favourite poet and all-round troublemaker, the great Frederick Seidel. Elegant and atrocious both, a wonder to behold! Love Susie. x

 

Me

 

The fellow talking to himself is me,

Though I don't know it. That's to say, I see

Him every morning shave and comb his hair

And then lose track of him until he starts to care,

Inflating sex dolls out of thin air

In front of his computer, in a battered leather chair

That needs to be thrown out . . . then I lose track

Until he strides along the sidewalk on the attack

With racist, sexist outbursts. What a treat

This guy is, glaring at strangers in the street!

Completely crazy but not at all insane.

He's hot but there's frostbite in his brain.

He's hot but freezing cold, and oh so cool.

He's been called a marvellously elegant ghoul.

 

But with a torn rotator cuff, even an elegant fawn

Has to go through shoulder seizures to get his jacket on.

He manages spastically. His left shoulder's gone.

It means, in pain, he's drastically awake at dawn.

A friend of his with pancreatic cancer, who will die,

Is not in pain so far, and she will try

To palliate her death, is what her life is now.

The fellow's thinking to himself, Yes but how?

Riding a motorcycle very fast is one way to.

The moon and stars rapidly enter you

While you excrete the sun. You ride across the earth

Looking for a place to lay the eggs of your rebirth.

The eggs crack open and out comes everyone.

The chicks chirp, and it's begun, and it's fun.

 

You keep on writing till you write yourself away,

And even after—when you're nothing—you still stay.

The eggs crack open and out comes everyone.

The chicks chirp, the poems speak—and it's again begun!

Speaking of someone else for a change, not me,

There was that time in Stockholm when, so strangely,

Outside a restaurant, in blinding daylight, a tiny bird

Circled forever around us and then without a word

Lightly, lightly landed on my head and settled there

And you burst into tears. I was unaware

That ten years before the same thing had happened just

After your young daughter died and now it must

Have been Maria come back from the dead a second time to speak

And receive the recognition we all seek.

 

Frederick Seidel