savage garden

 
Audrey Munson was the first nude woman in silent films.
it was she who was the dire sculpture of Pygmalion.

I would have made poems out of Germanesque movies & sad songs,
if no woman ever loved me.

I sat in saloons & beckoned a harlot, in a city that perhaps never was.
she painted on a name as coyly as she painted scarlet on her lips. we
went where the most lonely go: a sullen hotel composed of 2-dollar
chambers, & the sex that we had was the poetry of the streets.

the silence of black metal rifles roars in the broken terrain behind my
eyes. the somber photogravure of women who weep for soldiers,
gone & lost, is craquelure art.  the dust knows my heart.

my savage garden constant.  my sleepy warrior.
John, she said.  come to be.

call us fire of insight.  call us tyrant of words.
what would we be then?
merely tears in the river,
if the poem were unwritten…


(Art: Barrie Spence)