The Poet in the Dancing Dryad

By: Paik Posted on: March 31, 2014

Poets, I'm told, should be inspired by Nature.

So I wander Ulangi and try to admire

the hyacinth, stooped with the weight of its tiny stars,

or the impassive bearded moose grazing thoughtfully

while grook children squeal and splash past in their

webbed-foot hopscotch through the puddled bog.

But Nature only inspires when packed

with Meaning and Abstractions,

and trees are poor containers.

So I let Nature be, and leave for Mysia.

Because trees, like Trixy, should be naked

of affectation. And her doxy girls,

who are also not containers but

old shillelaghs, worn smooth from use

to fit the hands of many men,

and who are also not impressed

by the poetry of Abstractions.

And the incense smouldering by my doxy's bed

is not some symbol in this poem for breath,

or the Bloodsworn, or the charred body writhing

in the ecstasy of Their purifying warning.

It is simply incense, taking pleasure

in itself and in its task

to mask the scent of sweat left

by the latest satyr to profess his animal affections.

A consuming task.

Let us not further burden incense

with the boorish chore of Meaning.

Sing instead the brute fact of Things

in their un-abstracted fullness.

Like the worn, woolen blanket she keeps in a chest,

threadbare at the corners she teethed on as a child,

knit by her wind-bitten Tsol'aa mother

into a faded pattern of Ithmian cherry orchards.

These trees inspire. They contain

all the love one weary forestal could muster,

the slip-stitches tended as patiently as a grove,

the cabling imbued with such warmth it seems

a quarterstaff could be pulled from the purls.

A mother's homespun panacea

for the daughter she still believes

grew up to live safely in Cyrene,

where she perhaps serves kawhe,

learns culture from Scarlattan concerts,

and flirts chastely with Amadeo.

My doxy unpacks this blanket in the earliest morning hour

after Kelley's pirates have shouted their last drinking song

and carried each other out. Then

she washes the day's work from her body,

brushes the fine Mysian sand from her bed,

curls like a comma around this small scrap of wool

with its fading scent of her mother's grove,

and becomes a girl again.