The Poetics of Desire
Throw away your papers tonight
put aside your pen
let your fingers
write on my body,
an empty page
a word,
a sentence,
write a poem
if your syntax hurts my skin
if I sigh, if I moan
just tighten your embrace
if your fingers stammer
dip them in darkness
and start again
fill up my margins
suffocate me with your grammar
proofread the madness
you have created
erase with your lips
any mistakes
your fingers make
read to me
what you have written
see the pages of my life
come alive
in your fingers
tonight.
Commentary
Reading this poem one feels the words changing to music much like the run of the fingers on piano keys. A beautiful poem where the poet invites the reader, as it were, to leave alone the unidimensional monochromatic world of words and move over to the speechless reality of existence where life vibrates in truth and beauty. The poet asks the reader to abandon language and words as the vehicle of communication and get on with life and living.
Rina Singh is M.A. in Creative Writing an a teacher in Canada.
— P. G. Murthy
Links
There’s a short biography at http://www.edu.yorku.ca/~WIER/rina.html
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Reed C. Bowman · 20 December 2000
Great poem. It sounds like something straight out of Peter Greenaway’s movie The Pillow Book, which is based on - but greatly extends the visual, aural and tactile (or should I just say, sensual) meaning of - the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. It’s about a woman seeking to find the perfect lover-calligrapher to write poetry and stories on her body.
A movie about sex and calligraphy - how could it go wrong? About the relation of the visual and tactile aspects of writing to the meaning of the words written (and of course in Japanese poetry the appearance is highly important to the quality of the poem). The movie screen is frequently framed as if it were a traditional Japanese book; at the same time, since so much of it concentrates on writing on living skin, people become paper, or indeed they become books.
With that background I take the present poem at first more nearly at face value, more nearly with its literal meanings, than is probably normal or expected. But it holds up, at least the way I think of words and poetry; all the best poems remain powerful when looked at from many different angles and approached in many different frames of mind.
So I must disagree with the comments of P.G. Murthy: I would say that getting on with life and living can embrace the words of poetry, be enhanced by them, and be fulfilled in part through them. The poem itself shows that the world of words is anything but monochromatic and unsensual, and that in living as a sensual creature the reader need not abandon words any more than the poet has, but should rather sing words into flesh and move the body in a dance which becomes poetry.
Reed C Bowman