December 2018
I don’t think coherently about anything until I have picked up a Lamy fountain pen and let the ink glide across an unlined page in my Rhodia notepad. My family, poetry, my long-running workshop, and my standard poodle are the passions of my life. My latest book, Gravity: New and Selected Poems is now a reality; I plan to travel with it this year, and hope to meet many V-V poets along the way.
SIX GENRE
Novel
Anna under the train,
Emma’s apothecary poison,
and my late-twentieth century
life meanders, lacks plot.
Character and conflict
appear in abundance and on cue,
but I shrink from the climax,
not wanting the denouement
to occur without me.
Short Story
It’s true. The end
and beginning are hard,
but in between is bliss—
the gold coin of revelation—
with no further chapter
in which the piper appears
demanding to be paid
for the unconsidered slap,
the awful kiss.
Poem
I throw my shoulder
out of socket hurtling
lightning from the dark,
portentous clouds.
It’s not enough
to touch the gods,
I want to be one.
I think I am, in fact,
levitating here with you,
while below us
children cry
and want their supper.
Movie
In this re-make
the plot is hackneyed
but well-wrought
and the star turns reverse for twist:
she refuses to leave her husband
while he fears he’s just an object used
for sex.
Distraught, she tumbles
from plot point to plot point
praying deus ex machina
save me. Save me.
Play
Better to rise and fall
in one act.
Problems with the second
are classic:
everyone onstage to explain—
no ecstasy, all exposition.
What is sadder than the curtain on act three?
Extra time, to be sure,
but we fall on the sword
just the same.
Opera
Every night while I cook dinner
Mimi dies
in grand voice, consumptive
under a blood-spumed Paris moon.
How can there be more suffering than this?
Every night to die for passion,
yet be forced alive
assigned the living task of chopping onion,
smashing buds of garlic with a spoon.
from Gravity: New & Selected Poems, Tebot Bach, 2018
© 2018 Donna Hilbert
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