The Poem She Didn't Write and Other Poems. Olena Kalytiak Davis

boris tomashevsky.

      “i” thinks, on the other hand, “i mean i like in art when the artist doesn’t know what he knows in general; he only knows what he knows specifically”.

      “i” thinks: “that mantel piece is clean enough or my name isn’t bob rauschenberg”.

      “i” just wishes “i” could talk more smarter theory, no

      “i” just wishes “i” could write more smarter poems, no

      “i” thinks “WHY I AM A POET AND NOT A...”

      “i” thinks “KALYTIAK DAVIS PAINTS A PICTURE”.

      “i” wants to include the word coruscate in it, and, possibly, a quote from rudolf steiner.

      “i” wishes she could remember abrams’s definition of the structure of the greater romantic lyric, but that it presents “a determinate speaker in a particularized, and usually localized, outdoor setting, whom we overhear as he carries on, in a fluent vernacular which rises easily to a more formal speech, a sustained colloquy, sometimes with himself or with the outer scene, but more frequently with a silent human auditor, present or absent” and that “the speaker begins with a description of the landscape” and that “an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene” and that “in the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem” and that “often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation” evades her.

      “i” wants to say “silent human auditor, are you absent or present?” but “i” knows “i” makes, has made, that move too often.

      “i” knows “i” is alone in her red truck.

      “i” reconsiders, perhaps it is like giving good head?

      “i” thinks his his he himself, but not too bitterly, then

      “i” thinks “i”, then,

      “i” thinks “you”.

      “i” has not told her lover that “i” is not in love with him any longer, but “i” knows he knows, must know.

      “i” has not told her lover that “i” had a long conversation with “i’s” x-husband on the phone last night.

      “i” thinks “my sidestepping and obliquities”.

      “i” thinks love is what went wrong.

      “i” feels elizabeth bishop reprimanding “i”.

      “i” thinks like a gentle loving firm almost slap but really just a squeeze of, not on, the hand from a, the, mother neither one of them had for very long, long enough.

      “i” has not thought of “i’s” dead mother in a long time.

      “i” thinks of jonathan letham and his dead mother and his wall of books.

      “i” thinks of mark reagan and his walls and walls of books, and how his landlord, fearing collapse, made him move to the bottom floor.

      “i” thinks of doug teter and his smaller, but still, wall of books.

      “i” thinks of jude law.

      “i” thinks jude law probably doesn’t know how to read.

      “i” knows that no lover can be her “objective correlative”, still

      “i” thinks “so true a lover as theagenes”.

      “i” thinks “so constant a friend as pylades”.

      “i” thinks “so valiant a man as orlando”.

      “i” thinks “so right a prince as xenophon’s cyrus”.

      “i” thinks “so excellent a man in every way as virgil’s aeneas”.

      “i” notices dylan is almost done singing “to ramona”.

      “i” loves “everything passes, everything changes, just do what you think you should do”.

      “i” thinks dylan is singing to “i”.

      “i” thinks he means now, and now, and now; daily.

      “i” is almost there.

      “i” wonders if “i’s” meditation is too long, has gotten away from “i”.

      “i” thinks it should take precisely as long as the ride: 15 minutes tops; well, 30 in a snowstorm.

      “i” knows it is not snowing.

      “i” wonders if “i” should at this point even refer to “i’s” meditation.

      “i” thinks “man can embody truth but he cannot know it”.

      “i” thinks “especially under stress of psychological crisis”.

      “i” thinks what’s worse, anaphora or anaphrodesia?

      “i” thinks of the diaphragm still inside her.

      “i” shudders at the audacity of her sex.

      “i” is exactly on time to pick up her daughter.

      “i” must wait another 45 minutes to retrieve her son.

      “i” will try and remember to remove it promptly when they get back to “i’s” house, i.e., home.

      “i” has fucked with the facts so “you” think she’s robert lowell. (but whoever saw a girl like robert lowell?)

      “i” doesn’t care if “you”, silent human auditor, present or absent, never heard of, could give a flying fuck about, robert lowell.

Robert Lowell

      The dream, I don’t remember how it went,

      For I don’t really dream or count or know

      Why Robert Lowell: the only poet shade sent

      To acknowledge my cool ambition, light my cigarette.

      This is the decade of aughts and oughts

      And I am still naught. I am forty. In a tight

      T-shirt over my small ignoble breasts reading:

      “ALL’S MISALLIANCE”. Downward woman,

      Upward fish, said to him: What is it that you wish?

      Sir, on a brackish reach of shoal, is that

      Where we first met? I want to say it is

      But however impressive rhetoric that...

      It wouldn’t be “true”. I am a fraction more,

      Though, Sir, much much less than you. I

      Know how to change neither myself nor

      Earth nor sky. I don’t even try. Sailor,

      Cousin, Cal, though I am dark and against

      The grain, I don’t do what I do and I am

      Not plain. And though I stare I can’t see

      My face. Or hands. Or hair. Lowell: In a nother

       Ten years’ dream path life I would have fallen

       Heels over your pretty hellish head,

       I would have asked, and what would you have said?

      Said?