Barry Butson
Nervous Poem
When I haven’t sailed a poem in weeks,
I paddle back up that river of what’s been happening
and bother myself about becoming a desert.
I think of all the subjects drowned -
that photo of Chekhov and Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana,
obsequious listener and raving egoist:
(“I was an indefatigable fucker of whores”);
shiny leather sofa where Tolstoy screamed into the world
and where he insisted his litter of little Leos follow;
the shells of insect bodies on top of a window frame in spring
- every moment of every day “poemworthy”.
The shock room of the hospital
with its copper-trimmed, lever-lock door,
technician telling me “you must have a low pain threshold”
as my body levitates in fleeting flights from the gurney.
“The needles are very thin. Shouldn’t hurt much.”
The lightningbolt/thundercrack that launched me
to my knees from a chair near a window.
Every day of every week a plucking of nerves
strung so tight they sing in the wind
like telephone wires in winter.
But life is not art and art is not a videotape
or electromyography.
A photograph isn’t a poem and poetry
cannot be snapped like a shutter,
or nerve.
Page(s) 153
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