Four Poems
Medea: Momma Drama-Rama
[From the beginning] [before we could call it] [anything]
[before we could interpret] [her gaze]
[before we could sense it] [in her touch]
[her tenderness seemed] [qualified] [by some unspoken rule] [or law]
[prescribed] [if you will] [by an unseen hand]
[pulling her away] [replacing one impulse]
[with another] [foreign & feigned] & [because] [it was all we ever knew]
[all we ever felt] [we believed it] [to be the norm]
[understood her long silences] [learned to never call her name]
[lived among those formal] [arrangements]
[like one] [who learns] [to live among wolves]
& [she rewarded our obedience] & [our behaviors]
[by sitting soundlessly] [in our presences]
[a royal mother] [a statuette carved] & [concise]
[if she did not seem to notice] [if she seemed] [consumed]
[by the events] [whispered cautiously]
[in the shadow] [of our walls/cisterns/porticos]
[we taught ourselves] [to love her]
[despite the distance] [perhaps] [in spite of her resistance]
& [so] [when she appeared] [rigid lioness]
[our cries/pleas/screams seemed] [not that]
[of innocent victims] [but fragments]
[not unlike her own ghastly task] [to be performed]
[beyond the blood] & [bounty of time]
Dorian Gray: Let’s Pretend Most of this Happened
[Grin to groin] & [brow to butt]
[the body is hedonism’s most agreeable] [argument]
[A pleasure craft of skin] & [tissue] & [time]
[what it can’t perceive] [is not worth knowing]
[what it can’t feel] [is not worth feeling]
[debauchery] [for all of its youthful machinations]
[might not be] [the one-way street] [Dr. Mephistopheles]
[would have us ascribe]
[the painting] [for instance]
[handsomely made] & [hideously unmade]
[how not unlike] [so many Christian martyrs]
[leprous] & [reviled]
[personifying the stain] & [embodying the transgressions]
[hosting the filth] & [exemplifying the hazards]
[of worldly excess] [in order to be what] [Clean?]
Pippi Longstocking: Girl with the Dragon Spitting Gap
[Circumstances] [produced her]
[consequences] [formed her]
[experiences drove her] [to appear]
[one word] [at a time]
[each action] [a sequence] [an action sequence]
[influencing the events] [that must inevitably follow]
& [in this way] [she understood]
[the fundamental vacuum] [of thought]
[as it conspires with purpose] & [peculiarity]
[White beyond white] [a prison sky]
[a village of subtext] [it’s impossible to say]
[which determined her] [more]
[the failure of intelligence] [or the intelligence of failure]
[either way] [the difficulties became florescent]
& [vague] & [she] [an orphan of extremes]
[smiled] [w/ emptiness] [at nothing in particular]
& [the particulars] [of nothing]
Tom Joad: Allegory of the Cave
[Leaving prison][he did not look] [like a philosopher]
[which is to say] [outwardly he lacked]
[what Raphael] [sought to preserve]
[in The School of Athens] [none of the muscle]
[none] [of the contemplative contrapposto] [none]
[of the voluminous robes]
[not even] [the splayed] & [sprawling Diogenes]
[unimpressed] [half undressed]
[could express] [what the ex-con was] [thinking]
[if that’s what you want to] [call it]
[Leaving the cave] [has its costs]
[reinventing the invention] [minus the man]
[minus the spark] [of speech] [isn’t a lot to go on]
& [yet] [the story can’t begin] [without his Henry Fonda] [face]
[gazing westward] [wasteward] [knowing]
[w/ doubt] & [dust as his guide] [that nothing good]
[can come from] [what has already gone]
PATRICK MORAN is the author of five poetry books, editor of a contemporary Scottish poetry anthology, and creative writing teacher at Univ. of Wisconsin-Whitewater.