The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Wed 2/27/2008)

[RetroLounge]

The Right to Pleasure

You would think that I go mad with grief
when the white sails fill and the keel cuts
the waters like a knife honed on whetstone:
that's the way you're taught to interpret these signs—
matted hair, the salt-dirt lines where sweat has run,
hands that feed the mouth but will not wipe it.
But when my love decides to go and then is gone,
I can still taste him, bitter in the throat; I still
feel the weight of his body as he fights sleep.
I do not fight it: on the contrary, I live there,
and what you see in me that you think grief
is the refusal to wake, that is to say, is pleasure:
qui donne du plaisir en a, and so if
when he couldn't sleep in that long still night
you sensed it and woke to show him how
to unfasten each and every button, then it is
promised you, even when he goes—

Jessica Fisher

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Jessica Fisher’s Frail-Craft was the winner of the prestigious 2006 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Judge Louise Glück writes, “what gives Jessica Fisher’s work its sense of form, of repose, is her perfection of ear. That repose, with its strange mobility, its accommodation of surprise, is Fisher’s particular genius.” She is a doctoral candidate in English at U.C. Berkeley and is coeditor, with Robert Hass, of The Addison Street Anthology, which chronicles Berkeley’s rich poetic history.

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:hi:

RL

[BlueIris]

1. Nice!

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. My dear Retro!

Lovely!

Pleasure where you would expect grief...

Or perhaps, pleasure because of grief...

Anyway you see it...lovely...

Thank you...

:hug:

[xchrom]

3. ''parting is such sweet sorrow''

''the agony and the ecstacy''

mmmmm

[Inchworm]

4. "I do not fight it:...

on the contrary, I live there,
and what you see in me that you think grief
is the refusal to wake...is pleasure"

*sigh*

:thumbsup:

[RetroLounge]

5. kick

:kick:

RL