Grace at dVerse asks us to meet the bar by writing a palinode or palinody, “an ode or song that retracts or recants a view or sentiment to what the poet wrote in a previous poem.” She has various examples of this and I’ve chosen to follow Monica Youn’s model. Modernists like the young T.S. Eliot have always intrigued me, their loss of faith, their perceived dissolution of any moral center so that it could not “hold” (Yeats) leading to a hellish fragmentation of their psyche, the untethered remnants of a “lost generation.” Their poems nevertheless are replete with the religious symbolism of earlier ages. I thought I’d pluck a character from one of Eliot’s most famous poems (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) and see how he would do in a palinode.As a palate cleanser, which you may be in great need of after my clumsy fan fiction, listen to the Jeremy Irons reading of Eliot’s poem below. Click on Mr. Linky to read more dVerse palinodes and join in.
1.
I heard you reading it
in a quasi-New-England bar
standing on a leopard-skin rug
by lamplight and a Manhattan mermaid
with a Starbuck’s cup, heard you
rustling it out on a dry martini
the Brooklyn sky breaking in
through prison bars of light
as someone walked in
forgetting to close the door
letting the street in –
More billable hours, Billy-o!
What office is he in? I’ll talk to him
Later, darling, my place, Park Place –
and the stench of humanity and exhaust
stinging our eyes clean, scoured
of the leopard and the woman
and your contrived slapdashery
drained of all poetic concupiscence
landing with a thud
on the sawdust floor
of our imagination.
2.
I heard you reading it
softly to yourself, liltingly,
when I walked into the Brooklyn precinct
to question you. Your fingerprints
were on the knife, the knife plunged
into a woman whose arm was thrown
out and over the leopard throw
you tried to wrap her in, rolling her down,
down the stairs into the basement
towards an overwhelming question, WHY?
Your linen pants are cuffed, peach juice stains
on your crisp white shirt, your voice measures
out lines with a stammer into an empty cup
a Starbucks cup she’d been carrying
and as you raise your eyes to me
you say, “I don’t think she will sing,
I don’t think she will sing to me.”
