Poetry Written as if Tomorrow Were My Day

Posted on September 15, 2004 in Poems

When Sam Hamill delivered his workshop last April, he told us the story of the best “poetry enforcer” he ever had. Sam ran poetry groups inside of prisons. To keep the peace, he would point to the biggest, meanest motherfucker of the crew and say “You are my poetry enforcer. You keep the rest of these thugs in line.”

It wasn’t just a matter of keeping the guys from killing each other. Sam wanted to do something about the junkies who wrote self-pitying rot, the perennial bane of anyone who strives to teach people to break insipid conventions that reek of roses and lilies.

This particular enforcer understood what Sam was getting at and he told the fellows in the class “I want you to write the poem you would write if tomorrow was your day.”

This week, when my mortality squares off against me, when they will dispatch a curious lamprey into my circulation to see out the scarlet estuaries feeding my heart, I remembered Sam’s best poetry enforcer and wrote these:

Angiogram

Seven hours of stuffy darkness
the feeble grant of night.

Do you worry about Sin
Mr. Poet?
On the operating table
they shall see your heart.
At least you know that your soul is not
that hunk of meat fit for a dog.

Pass through as the catheter does
seeking the chamber
where the mutters of a mute mouth
drool a river, Oceanus,
that comes around every bay
lapping at the Japan in your toes,
the California in your ears.

---

For A Mute Troubadour

We saw fossils in the rock
clams overlapping
around stones brought by a dead river
off the young backs of mountains.

We live clustered, layered,
shoving out for our piece of space.
The sediments fall so slowly
that they roll
off new mountains
into fresh rifts.