A Restitution

In Which the Poet Commandeers a Page
to Abuse the Reticence of the Editor

Being, oneself, an occasional subject of his rigors,
one would not wish to appear to fawn
upon this eminent person.
Consider, nonetheless, his occupational hazards. 
Here is an office
littered with fragments of disquieting lives,
deep fables, bold dialectics,
experiments straight out of the id.
 
Here is a desk laden with memoirs of muses
gone with terrorists and theologians and wits,
gone histrionic, ecological, and psycho.
 
Every mail brings sins against art and Aristotle,
unsolicited symposia upon truth and beauty,
and considerable weeping in strange keys.
 
Awaiting, importunate, down in the stacks
are selves pledged to divulge,
to celebrate and rue and haul down,
pure lookers,
bland mockers,
ecstatic iconoclasts and intemperate lovers
bearing lore from the cafes of counterworlds
and revelations of the inner child,
cabalistic,
apocalyptic,
fraught with paradox
and ideology,
with angst and absurdity
and libidinal myth.
 
Consider, then, the depredations
upon this honest broker to the human experiment,
himself, perhaps, caught in the swerve of things,
himself, perhaps, in fervid search
for the self who is looking everywhere for him.
Consider the moral toil of adjudicating
the best that is being thought and said,
his collegial station and the very ethos
hanging in the balance.

Oliver Rice | Mudlark No. 41 (2010)
Contents | To the Government