Live your life as a bourgeois, that you
may be violent and original in your art.
Gustave Flaubert
I need a fix.
Here among the coral-
trimmed houses safe from rampion
cravings, filth or charismatic
plots, the past is a tame
account told by a parrot, wings
clipped. Wings? What wings?
he squawks. He's fixed:
saved from buffalo sauce--hot or tame--
oily coral
smothering possibilities of charismatic
majoram, rampion
desire. You know the tale: how rampion
led to Rapunzel's tower, her wings--
her tumbling charismatic
hair--her pince a quick fix
in the lonely forest's coral
suburbs. Pretty tame
unless you happen to be the witch. Tame
was loss: her walled garden's rampion,
her bartered daughter's coral
lips. (Who cares which lips?) Wings,
kisses, a pretty perch fixed
that witch's charismatic
soul. Is my charismatic
soul (well, character) too tame?
Has the art of fixing
shadowed lines with words--my rampion
desire--taken wing,
left for some exotic island's coral
reef, self-maimed amid the coral
sunsets like some charismatic
Gauguin? For years invention's wings
hopped, stuttered, stooped on the tame
beach at Kitty Hawk until rampant
desire took off, provided the fix.
GEORGIA REVIEW: (Winter, 1997)
