poem || Peter Sherburn-Zimmer

In Place of a Private Winter

 

So, I wrote 'Insistence in an Archaic Language'

and the poem that thought it was about Ferlinghetti

but was about Pound instead.  I woke up

thinking about the difficulty in writing in a private language,

even to myself, ...the trouble communicating

fifty years ago when none of what I said

made any sense to anyone else

 

and decided I wasn't going to feel bad about that

and wasn't going to feel bad about myself

even if today wasn't all that much fun

or wasn't what I wanted it to be

with watching old movies and all that.

 

I can write myself anything I want to

and don't need to show it around or

I can show it around and pretend other people

need to understand it, even if they don't.

They think it's a joke when I say

it's all in code anyway or they don't think

I know what I'm saying when I say that.

 

But its ok cause its not dialogue from a 1940s movie,

even if that is what it sounds like to me, even

after I turn the movie off, with dialogue written

by William Faulkner, or not: you can't believe

everything you read, or so my brother used to say,

or was it my sister?  They were all so full of wisdom

it's taken fifty years to figure that out and

I still don't believe one bit in autobiography,

even if that is all that is available.

 

Or listen to Dr. Williams: "—since we know nothing, pure /

and simple, beyond / our own complexities."

Available, that is, in the place of talking with other people

and not being understood.  Not that being understood

is the be all and end all of anything at all

on another rainy day that takes the place

of what ought to be winter in a place that doesn't have a winter

in the first place, not one that you could recognize anyway.

Not a language you would recognize anyway in the end.