It takes a tru­ly great writer,
Of great courage, to turn
Play­ful­ness into pathos.

This in response to my neighbour’s
Poet­ry, so play­ful, so
Emi­ly Dick­in­son and then
Frost and Stevens and O’Hara
Maybe, and def­i­nite­ly Sylvia
(cow-heavy in her Victorian
Flo­ral dress) yet such
Play­ful­ness is not to be
Attempt­ed lightly,
So dan­ger­ous is its profound
Effect on neigh­bours and on
Neigh­bour­ing causes,
So didac­tic and so elemental
In what it achieves and what
It leaves unachieved, to be achieved by others.
In short we must incorporate
Play­ful­ness but take note of
This very incor­po­ra­tion, that is to
Say, we need a body first, we
Need a face first and strong facial
Mus­cu­la­ture at that, on which we may
Fix and alter our smiles at will
(O so many words to part with,
O so repressed my effluvial,
Effu­sive selfhood),
And thus
The Dick­in­son of Cap­i­tal Death
And the Frost of the pas­toral epic
And then so many of them
William Car­los and Walt and Walcott,
The fren­zy of servi­tude and the
Earnest­ness of heavy chains
And the prof­li­gate seri­ous­ness and
Moral­i­ty of the colonised soul who
Clings to the dear lan­guage of
Oppres­sion and feels deeply its
Solemn wound, unable to choose
And unwill­ing to recant,
Cantare cantare
La can­zone del­la Salce,
O ten­der­est soul most
White-ready to be stran­gled by
Your strong negro-blood and
Thus ready to give birth to
The high tragedy of lived art –
It is in this ele­men­tary way
That we reach out to the
Periph­er­al tis­sue of the old
Moth­er tongue-in-cheek
And thus any sub­ver­sion and any
Play is noth­ing but – noth­ing if
Not – a tremor in the heart
Hard­ly per­cep­ti­ble at the lev­el of
The feet and hard­ly able to alter
The basic, the fundamental
Drum-tap-drum-beat of blood
Pour­ing out effort­less­ly into all
The liv­ing expanse of the language –
Mighty Leviathan that it is, to this
Very day, when
To mark my hand
I write.
 

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