What is Already There by Marie Martin

My poems frighten my lover.
He says they make him feel implicated.
I assure him he is not
The only one –

My lover says the only way he can read
My poems is to practice detachment –
To remove all context, to absorb
Only words, to hang on to a raft of meaning
Building itself as it simultaneously
Floats and sinks.

If the words started to mean too much
If the veil were pulled aside
Then this was no longer poetry
But the rantings of a mad whore
Of a drama queen poised for great tragedy
Of unsympathetic gods casting down the template
For that which would entertain them most,
Regardless of the suffering it may or may not cause –

And I could not even begin to explain Cassandra to him.
How what I knew was already known.
How the poems were already written, how I am never
Free of desire. I am the conduit that traces
My fingertip against the muddied windowpane.
This is how the story begins. With what is
Already there. The poem is only a moment.

And this is when my lover enjoys my poems the best.
When there is nothing in them he can find
That would lead to his own door, that would mark him
as an unquestionable member of this hysterical society.
Questions I would never ask him,
That which in our real lives I would pretend not to see.

My poems are written in the blood
Of an oft-bitten tongue, the ink is my liquified sorrow,
My tears, my regret, the babies that did not come
this month or last, his cum on my thigh, stray hairs,
My own juices come to roost on the page.

Of this he wants to know nothing.
Of this he cannot abide.
It is better for all of us
For me to speak only of myth –

I crown my lover Hektor, Orpheus,
Phoebus Apollo, Dionysus –
He of the shining helm, lyre-strummer,
Bearing curses and jugs of wine.