Autumn 2000

 

Peter Meinke

SHE, BEING AN ARTIST

 

She being an artist understood
delayed gratification her touch
and tongue lingering perhaps an inch
from driving them crazy Womanhood

was a state she elected to study
resolving at an early age
to polish her given gifts uncaging
the innate forces of her body

the way Picasso and Dickinson
let the wind howl through their fingers
to bend the world There was nothing
she didn't try or try again

overcoming the equivalent
of writer's block by sheer desire
till she and her partners were on fire
at exactly the intensity she meant

She knew she was an artist: it
was her way of publishing giving more
pleasure than any passionate score
boldfaced page rounded stone stiff

canvas until she became a heroic
endowment all by herself granting
her lucky applicants the best gift
in the world: their own dreams at work

and she funded both women and men
not without discrimination but
in abandoned abundance so that
eventually her largesse extended

across state lines in fact
across any line you or I can imagine
a lagoon of honey bubbling
over its bed sweetening every pebble in its path

from ZINC FINGERS, (U. of Pittsburgh Press, June 2000), Peter Meinke's eleventh book of poems. Meinke, who has recently been writer-in-residence at Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio, lives in St.Petersburg FL.

 

 

 

 

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