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I want to be understood,
like every fool.
Like the wind.
Like the honeybee.
I'm dumb as a meteorologist,
or apiologist,
not content
to act the vane,
or spin with
the momentum of the planet.
Or to get buzzed
by the petal to petal,
pollen dance
tickling my nostrils,
hachoooo!
I want to be understood;
translate it all
into a gibberish of symbols,
a code to breach
the defences of another mind
like an exploding drone.
Why can’t I just
sit back and jaw-drop
ooh! and ahh!
under the canvas Big Top
along with the other yokels;
watch the lion that doesn’t decapitate
his trainer, and
the trapeze-idiots doing flips,
catcher swinging
like a clock
open arms
waiting and
waiting and
waiting
and
to be saved.
This poem is like a Picasso painting, looking at (or trying to look at) the wind and the honeybee from varying perspectives, extrapolating the wind to the meteorologist and then to the weather vane, and the honeybee to the apiologist (love this word, which looks on first glance like "apologist") and then to the petals of the flowers. And, if I read it right, ultimately unable to get to the essence of either the wind or the bee! Like Kafka's Hunger Artist, the poet is drawn to the world of poetry, unable to escape from it, unable to free himself from it., but unable to be satisfied by it! How he wishes he can lose himself in the simple "oohs and ahhs" of a circus, but that's not happening. The circus is not going to "save" him. He's condemned to the daunting and unforgiving task of searching for meanings and essences, even as he knows he will never find them.
ReplyDeleteDamn that's a brilliant interpretation. Makes sense to me. Hadn't considered Cubism. It was one of those high-wire poems that I tiptoed dangerously across trying to find balance, one end to the next, hoping it would come together as a death defying feat.
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