Uploaded on December 29, 2007
by Pavlunka
In This World Together
Society makes her bitter as
bitter flowers, bitterer, in fact
because she is made to succeed.
Everyone makes her perform
and as she performs she ascends
an invisible ladder so high, so
high—but she would scoff at that and this
because she doesn’t understand it.
She hates a green prison and hates a green queen.
She hates me
and I wanted to cry, but couldn’t due to
Gertrude Stein. The poet-general.
The one who wrote
A Completed Portrait of Picasso.
Now I’m writing my own portrait and I wonder
Will it be abstract or realistic?
Abstraction is unchartered nuns, no ones,
in pretty how towns.
Abstraction is Jackson Pollock
at the Tate (Katie’s poem)
painting his own anger.
You should have seen my sister’s anger—
she was shrieking she had to stay up late
and get up early to study.
Our grandmother was a Gertrude, Gertrude Zepeda.
My sister vaguely looks like her with her
thin lips and raven hair. And I don’t hate her.
My reaction to her is one of admiration and exasperation.
“Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.”
My sister is obviously Jacob.
Why is this true?
I don’t know. All I care about now
is the poem.
Jon once called what I do in my poems pedestrian.
So I thought about that for a while and I liked
what a critic said about a poet using her charm
to propel the poem.
My sister doesn’t have to use charm she
always comes clean. No tricks up her sleeve.
I like mystery and keeping things
hidden so to produce an abstract image.
Not pedestrian. Spontaneous,
on the spot, going on one’s nerve, like jazz.
This isn’t a popular stance.
We are in a right-wing blowing wind
and crazy lives in a green prison.
Do I choose this? Do I? Or do You make me live here.
My sister keeps circulating.
She runs around and around
she doesn’t want to get caught—
a butterfly dry and pinned.
“Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.”
I think of that when I think of her running.
Yoga teaches us to stop
at the first signs of pain.
I didn’t, but eventually I did
stop and I died a little.
The poem doesn’t die, it
lapses into melancholy
but I can bring it back with a shot
of something—maybe something freaky
like some allusion or memory
of speed riding a Munich train
my sister and I riding a Munich train 1999
“watching colors changing.”
My sister, cold and bitter, thin as a rail
and me, cold and sweet, thinking
of a machine made out of words
racing by, in the air, so high, so high—
October 2007
