This week’s poem has a verbal audacity and a headlong associating momentum that puts a smile on my face at the same time that it makes me feel for and with a speaker who wishes she’d better learned what love is as a girl.
Adrian Blevins teaches at Colby College. Her most recent book is “Appalachians Run Amok,” which won the Wilder Prize from Two Sylvias Press and appeared in 2018.
Apologia
By Adrian Blevins
As for love I’m in favor
but how to say it is frankly
the hindrance if you were
a heartfelt monkey as a girl
or a wind-up toy monkey
or a just a honey monkey
stupid on the back of a bike.
A monkey in a school play
on monkeys! A monkey
with a monkey for a heart
watching Jane Fonda & Jane
Seymour & Jane Goodall
on TV to learn the basics
such as how to kiss & dress
& who to moon for or dupe
& ditch & block or shut in
& asphyxiate. About love
I am saying there should have been
in those mountains a Cherokee
with clichéd feathers for a hat
& a series of instructions
made of hand waves & smoke
& little hearts & arrows
drawn in the dirt meaning
“touch here & here & good
& go” while above the feathers
flit fairies like in Disney
& Shakespeare & fireflies
like in real life in summer
in Virginia with their heat
all over the whole situation
like love’s a bang or a kiln
& not this other nighttime
repentance thing in January in Maine
so tongue-tied & faraway.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2018 Adrian Blevins. It appeared originally in “Appalachians Run Amok” (Two Sylvias Press, 2018) and appears here by permission of the author.
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