Cataloguing Diffidence (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

1

What is a poem if not a scream in the night?
Way up a dark street there’s man clasping a knife
He drives it again and again into a woman’s belly
He loves and hates fiercely and disproportionately
He cannot abide knowing that she breathes and talks
He cannot abide knowing that she lives
That she has eyes and the rest of her for others

2

A poem is the story of a man beleaguered by misery
Fraught with the redolence of jealousy and fury
A man schemes and plots the end of things
He plots the end and consummation of life and death
He plots the living to be done in the interim
He’s got a bloated heart and swollen eyes and a parched mouth
A poem is a dead man reminiscing and grunting
It’s a dead man disapproving of and rejecting
The manner of his death and the ignominy behind it
When he was stabbed in a doorway holding a ring of keys

3

A poem is a box of photographs locked up in a desk drawer
A poem is a woman in a doorway smoking and waiting
It’s a woman expectant and alarmed and exultant in her desire
She pines for a the stranger who’ll pay to have her in the alley
A poem is an isolated garden where a British general
From the Napoleonic wars was exiled in death
He was buried and forgotten by everyone
But for the poetess who wrote him lugubrious verses in Gaelic
The poem was chiseled on dark marble by a monumental mason
It is a remorseful tribute to loneliness by a lonely woman
The poem sings of the bravery and indignities of war and death
And has retained the patina and queerness of time
The Gaelic poem continues to keep its vigil over the dead soldier
It blooms and writhes in the isolation of the garden
Alive with wisteria and roses and old bent trees
The walls enclosing the garden were once fortifications
With ramparts and gun emplacements
And massive granite turrets where guards kept watch
The former garrison retains the gloom of unknowable episodes
Of despondency and death and of the relentlessness of time
This garden is a poem to oddities and to the tenuous and beautiful
It’s a poem to untenable oaths and to opprobrium and to hatred
The Gaelic poem written two centuries ago
Isn’t all that different from the consuming love
Manifested sometime after eleven thirty last evening
In one killer’s knife and his victim’s bloody perforations


4

This is the poem of weeping and beseeching and mumbling
It’s a poem replete with accusations and provocations
It’s the poem of the priest’s benediction from the altar
It’s is the poem of the lonely man prostrated and weeping
And pleading unseen in a room with his hands clasped
In supplication to his god and minder at an hour of need
It’s the poem of a type of love one can’t show others
Because it’s a love to which words won’t cling
It’s a love there’s no one else to notice
And take comfort in
It’s the saddest and truest poem you’ll learn
The words you’ve given it are your own
And in as much as these words fail to convince you completely
These are the only words you’ve got
And the words you’ve elaborated and constructed your poem with
And to you alone these words ring specific and true
Cumbersome or not you say right and again yes because
For the present you’re done with cataloguing diffidence


© J.Noya 2006