The Radiant Nadirs Of The Underestimated
The radiant nadirs of the underestimated,
all these small town upstairs windows at night
where people bloom like flowers,
trout lily, hepatica, wood violet
under the duff of life,
old books and teetering obelisks of magazines,
nobody’s ever going to see
in this hemisphere
unless their clockwise life
has gone down the wrong way
and the world’s been turned
up side down on its head
so you’re compelled to walk on stars
to keep from falling off.
There’s a novelist across the street.
Window to window our apartments stare
blankly at each other
through the dirty winter grime
and the occasional moon
and ambivalent rose of the dawn
after a long sleepless night
when even the dead are appalled by the solitude.
Seven novels and he’s never published a word.
Seven novels. A mouth and a heart
like the Gulf of St. Lawrence
but no Cabot, Cartier, Champlain.
And there’s a poet I know
a mere four blocks away, beautiful,
a wild crazy witch of a woman
among muses that couldn’t hold a black candle
up to the serpent fire she can inspire
in any two lines of a poem
that could take a common garter snake
and give it the wings of a dragon,
a genius who’s laid herself aside to raise a baby
and write in between the cracks of concrete
her crackhead ex keeps trying to pave her with
like a parking lot on a coke binge.
She’s the spearhead of a blade of grass
trying to wound its way through stone
into the light
but it’s not likely
she’s ever going to make it
given the avalanche of circumstance
that waits for her like a mountain on the other side
to come up for air in the middle of a seal hunt.
Unknown geniuses, the gifted secrets
of heretical martyrs and orthodox suicides
like the Sylvia Plaths, the Emily Dickinsons,
the Kafkas, the Rimbauds, the Van Goghs
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poem by Patrick White
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