A THOUGHT FOR AVERILL

“I learned life is not personal,” the poet Averill Curdy writes in his piece in the July/August 2012 Poetry magazine.

You learned wrong, Averill. Life is nothing if not personal. 

We go to colleges of some prestige to learn to distance ourselves from the all-to-personal aspect of life. We come away somewhat shielded, perhaps with veneration for those who went before us into that good night untouched, unfettered by the insatiable personal-ness of it all.

OH REALLY LAWRENCE?

 I rail against Ferlinghetti’s premise:

“there is what used to be called the ‘mystery of Woman,’

a romantic concept that endowed her with an illusive inscrutable

allure, both sexual and spiritual. 

Then the feminist revolution brought Woman down from her

pedestal.”

What pedestal? I ask.

Raped in back alleys, suffering back-room abortions, or

raising children alone in ghetto apartments?

Where is the allure of a screaming child,

going without enough to eat, warm clothes to wear,

or a man to hold him and to mold his character?

No mystery in the drudgery of waitress

days, spent

Standing on swollen feet, 10, 12 hours at

a stretch.

No allure in broken bones, 

swollen lips or blackened eyes

suffered by battered women.

“the feminist revolution,” Lawrence,

freed women from their bondage

of male fantasy, Romantic pedagogy,

and unspoken suffering.

Take your wistfulness, Lawrence,

o’re fantasy lost

And shove It.

SIMPLE PLEASURES

I like the concave

shape of a spoon,

it’s simple symmetry

of curve and line.

“He liked to spoon,”

she said.

And I thought of you.

Curved  ’gainst my back,

or I ’gainst yours,

we’d drift 

eluding consciousness --

Two travelers in the

world of counterpane,

intent on hedonistic pleasures

of the gentlest kind.

ONE COW AT A TIME

Angie wanted to give a milk-producing waterbuffalo to a poor family.

She’d read it was the thing to do so families in developing countries

could have enough milk to drink. And some to sell.

She’d read it On one of those “Save The World” websites.

But why send good American Dollars to The Sudan? Angie thought.

She saved her dimes and quarters, 

And by December had enough to buy the cow.

She sent it to a family whose name she found on the web,

the address suggested a tenement apartment on the Lower East side

of Chicago.

Angie felt good about the gift.
But somehow the waterbuffalo gift Didn’t turn out right.

Sure, the family had more than enough milk, 

But the Housing Authority made them move.

Go Figure

NEPHILIM NO MORE

Do the children of the Nephilim

still walk the earth?

Banished from the Heavens,
their fathers defied
God's plan
mating with mortal women.

Slain by Michael,
They came to their end.
But what of their offspring?

Are they the Yeti

said to flee from man’s sight

As they wander the Himalayas,

timid, yet gigantic in size?

Would you know one 

if you saw one?

Would her language be

unfathomable to human ears?

“Eiiyee,

I am the Nephilim spawn,”

she’d cry.

Her attempts to share

her loneliness

falling on deaf ears.

I have expanded and reformated the chapbook of short stories and poems I published in May. It is titled "The Presence of Loss" It is available on Amazon by searching my name under "books" search, Susan Tuz or the title.

WOMAN AS VESSEL

Some sisters hate the thought

of woman as vessel.

But if the poet is

the vessel,

And language the medium,

then Vessel Woman I gladly am.

Picasso stands beside

an urn,

back of a nude adorning it.

His look is pensive,

his pose, the same.

Woman is truly his vessel.

His medium,

canvass and paint.

The medium of language

inadequate,

He is trapped in Spanish.

Thus,

he drinks from the vessel often,

Reporting his conversations

with nature in periods.