after David Markson
Poet has been trying to eschew emotion.
Impartial directness, Poet wants.
I was born like this. I had no choice. I was born with the gift of the golden voice.
graveled Leonard Cohen one night at the Kimmel Center.
I’m crazy for love, but I’m not coming on.
You can’t really put it that way anymore.
Which is to say, Poet knows that sentimentality is out of season.
All men say ‘What’ to me,
wrote Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Poet has heard the joke becomes serious with space; to make sentiment felt, one should make it cold.
The bones of Amelia Earhart & Fred Noonan on Gardner Island.
The bones of a man & a woman.
The bones of a turtle beside a turtle shell.
Nearly everyone has four of them — broad flat muscles, known as obliques, that attach the ribcage and the pelvis on each side of the body and, until recently, have not really been part of the sports lexicon,
wrote sportswriter Michael R. Schmidt in The New York Times from April 11, 2011.
What are your “poetic tasks”?
Poet has been collecting fragments in a marble notebook.
Poet is interested in fact.
Madonna of the Rocks. The Kit Kat bar.The contact lens.
Sometimes Poet enjoys a good snow drifts metaphor, or an ashes metaphor, or an autumn leaves metaphor.
The dead metaphor.
…with the music chased all out of her soul…and the seven small demons all in again.
Some of her poems include the appearance of a black tuxedo kitten.
Cat and mouse, cat and mouse! But which is the cat and which is the mouse?
It seemed to her that there were certain places on the earth, which naturally brought forth happiness, as though it were a plant native to the soil, which could not thrive elsewhere.
How much beauty one can find, can't one?
wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo.
Poet, at times, enjoys the intensely personal.
All that is personal soon rots.
Or the grand gesture.
On New Year's Eve in 1853 Benjamin Waterhouse hosted a china, silver, and candlelight dinner inside the iguanodon skeleton at Crystal Palace. The first course was mock turtle soup.
For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.
And when Amelia Earhart wrote: In those fast-moving days which have intervened, the whole width of the world has passed behind us – except this broad ocean. I shall be glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.
Couldn’t those words be whispered to a lover?
Once Poet had a therapist to whom she did not unburden her soul.
But she unburdened a little.
I am not long-enduring; I am not cool and dispassionate. Out of pity to me and yourself, put your finger on my pulse, feel how it throbs, and – beware!
That must have been difficult, Dr. Lobianco said.
Provided the feelings are real…
Lately, Poet’s writing has been cool to the touch.
A poem that has abandoned the poet.
Poet has been repurposing what she likes.
Sorrow floats.
Negligence is the mind in motion.
Objectively, Poet should be thinking of her future.
Poet knows she has a lot to live up to.
Pia Archangel a newscaster
Pia Cayetano a politician
Pia Christmas-Møller a politician
Pia Clemente, a film producer
Pia Conde, a journalist
Pia Cramling, a chess player
Pia Degermark, an actress
Pia Di Ciaula a film editor
Pia Douwes an actress
Pia Getty a socialite
Pia Gjellerup a politician
Pia Guanio a television presenter
Pia Guerra a comic book artist
Pia Gutjens a border collie breeder
Pia Hansen a shooter
Pia Haraldsen a tv personality
Pia Hontiveros a tv personality
Pia Johansson an actress
Pia Kjærsgaard a politician
Pia Lindström a television anchor
Pia Carmen Lionetti an archer
Pia Elda Locatelli a politician
Pia Maiocco a musician
Pia Miranda an actress
Pia Nielsen a badminton player
Pia Nilsson a golf player
Pia Nilsson a politician
Pia Reyes a model and actress
Pia Sundhage, a footballer
Pia Sundstedt a cyclist
PiaTajnikar an athlete
Pia Tassinari a singer
Pia Tikka a film director
Pia Tjelta an actress
Pia Toscano a singer
Pia Waugh a free software advocate
Pia Wunderlich a footballer
Pia Zadora an actress and singer
Pia Zebadiah a badminton player
Pia Zinck an athlete
Though sometimes your name sounds strange attached to another life.
And still another Pia wrote,
The angel dwells on the other side of subjectivity.
Poet wants to become untrapped.
To be a feather again instead of a plummet, to float and not to drag.
Or, maybe, Poet just wants to live unabashedly with abundance.
The Capuchini bone chapel.
Belief in irrelevance, perhaps, Poet lacks.
If the body in its failure remains
A nest, if the soul chooses to return
Poet has been watchful.
Poet has been too silent in booths and bars.
Messages in a bottle which might or might not get picked up,
Paul Celan said his poems were.
It is possible that Poet has been letting others speak for her.
I am a crowd, I am a lonely man, I am nothing.
Lushly. Honestly.
A tree sprang up. O sheer transcendence!
Poet wants to be wild.
For the wildest imaginations have their speeds and obsessions.
How to abide.
The most natural thing in the world.
Everything in this room is edible.
Author’s Note:
“Thrall” borrows words and phrases from Leonard Cohen, Emily Dickinson, Michael R. Schmidt, George Eliot, Rope, Gustave Flaubert, Vincent Van Gogh, William Butler Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Amelia Earhart, Charlotte Brontë, Berthe Morisot, John Irving, “Pia (given name)” entry on Wikipedia, Pia Tafdrup, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Michael Waters, Paul Celan, Rilke, and Roald Dahl.