In This World Together

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