Addressing the muse
Merlie Alunan
(from her collection Poet's Choice)

The Muse, they called you, spelled
in impressive capitals, stuck you up on a peg
where they could worship you and make as though
your favors were what made their verse.

The guys had had it pretty well figured--
you were so lovely and so young, so glib,
so odd, your wit an effrontery to be contained.
Perched alone in your temple afterwards,
kept in the cold and the dark, not much
you can do but listen, while the fools
mangled metaphors inditing sonnets to your name.
And when their metres ran wild, as often
they did, riding askew of their sense,
why, you were there to take all the blame.

What names you are called at Club 96
where those rhyme mongers gather
to drown their bad tropes in raw beer
and ranting--frigid you are said to be,
heartless, or bored, snoring away
while they fried in the passional urges
of their dirges and odes. Poor Muse,
you were much blamed for all that bad verse.

None of them by women fortunately.
Between the bedpost and the crib,
darning socks and chickens to feed
and the stewpot to stir in-between,
little chance for women here to err.
The world, it was said, spared of worse.
Well, but who knows what better,
had things been different--half the world's
genius gone down the drains, it is said,
with laundry water, or stewed to death
in the cooking pot, or lost in the history
of wiping snot from children's noses.

Dear Muse, our separate worries
had kept whole generations split--
you always got too much attention.
For most of us, the opposite.
So hitching up our girdlestraps
we pulled ourselves out of the gutter,
the dustbin, the hole, the cellar,
the closet, the woods, wherever
we were supposed all this time to have been,
by dictum natural or fiat of tradition.
We've done well by ourselves, thank you,
not one jot of it, Muse, we owe to you.

We learned a few things too,
as we pulled through:
you're one big scam, if we may say so,
and so were all those who worshipped you.
We say verse is fun in the doing,
true, that's what we're saying.
And if our rhymes now are only limping,
why Muse, the blame stops with us,
we don't pass it on, not to one
of our kind, certainly not to you.

As for a Muse for ourselves, a man of course,
that nonsense we won't stand for (neither
would the fellows, we suspect, who've had
less practice in posing and preening, or
whatever it is that Muses are good at
or good for, though as for that,
who can really tell?). Now then,
when the verse falls easy, smooth as honey,
and sweet as rain in an April day, why,
no hem and haw about it,
credit, we say, to whom it's due--
we did it ourselves, Muse,
no thanks to you.

Come off that high peg, old girl,
and join us, the company's good.
Come the best way, as one of our peers,
woman to woman, sister to sister,
friend to friend. But not as Muse, please,
that's a luxury we can barely afford.
With so much to be done, we can use
all the hands, bless you.
Come as yourself then.
Gritty and rough, raw and avid and smoky
with promise, eager and wild and hungry
for touch, the words wait.
Come as a poet.

Labels: arts, culture, literature