Workshop Poem; or, Sorry, Austin
One participant said saxophones
are always being asked to do
too much work in poems.
They are always there growling about
sex, and cigarettes smoking alone, it seems
to me. And so, she objected. Another woman
felt that way about cicadas. You know,
she said, they’re always there in the background
with their dizzy wings, the infernal saw
of Georgia nights, or Mississippi,
or some godawful Southern swamp. They never work.
Sorry. For me, offered the last, it’s bougainvilleas.
And they all agreed. The heavy-scented,
head-filling veil of their pungency, wafting
or whatever, across the veranda, it’s predictable.
And then there’s that thing about Vietnam,
the association with the Mekong Delta, or bombs,
or I don’t know, but bougainvilleas are just
too much. And so there we were,
with the cicadas and the saxophones and the bougainvilleas
roaring around the table, the poem
flat and quiet between us. Our work
here is done, one announced. Thank you
for the generosity of your words.
—Lynnell Edwards
____
from her book, The Farmer's Daughter, Red Hen Press, 2003