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Artifact From The Emotional Dig In your hands I am a blank sheet of paper you fold in half then fold in half again. You place me on the table, four squares unfolded beneath the palm of your small hand. In your other hand is a fountain pen held against the callous lump on your naked ring finger. In the first square you write: Lover, you are a simple machine that can not drive my complexity. You are a sigh collapsed in thin mountain air. You're the fiddler's frantic bowing unable to claim a melody. In the next square you write: Lover, I am not the promise of song perched in winter branches, or the souvenir from a foreign war you weren't allowed to fight. Nor am I Beauty's best friend come to sleep the night disguised as Beauty. In the third square you write parenthetically: Dressed in the skins of frailty you eagerly limped to the stoop of my desire, and I taught you to worship through silence at the altar of my indifference where you ruined your knees unable to rise to any occasion. In the last square, the one in the lower right hand corner, you write: Nothing remains. I even removed the stain of you, the rosy flush upon my skin aroused beneath the swirls of your fingertips. You blow lightly across my face until the ink has dried, an expository tattoo. In your hands I am this old sheet of paper you fold in half then fold in half again. © Dave Durham |
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Commentary: That I enjoyed disgracing myself with this woman is itself a disgrace. Writing this poem, over twenty years after the fact, was an attempt at some sort of redemption, if not revenge. I take the poem out every once in a while and attempt, through revisions, to raise it above the realm of therapy to something approximating art. I must confess that in the stanza about the third square I started to have a little fun. This could be a good thing.
Dave Durham Bonfire contributor
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