Goldberg, Beckian Fritz

FROM ANCIENT LEGENDS AND INFIDELITIES,
CH. 3, “PERVERSE MUSES“
Every poem has its pig.
— Rilke

1.  
2. The motorcycle passing my bed at night has a rumination so umbrous the whole night stirs. And then the low endless wwhaaaa of cars far away. This is the whole thing: At night through the silence to hear something far away. If it is a bell, a dog, a motor, a door shut —
3.  
4. In the story of the princess locked in the castle every night she’d listen for the sound of a key, for every night someone would come down the long torchlit corridor and drop their key, clink, on the stone floor. Through the space under her cell door all she could see was shadow, bending to pick up the key. Or so she imagined.
5.  
6. It is a great moment in a story when someone pauses at a door but does not open it.
7.  
8. The motorcycle disappears into its own whisper and leaves me the wake of the road, the little location I can sense just under my left shoulder a moment before it dies.
9.  
10. Over time she fell in love with the clumsy shadow.
11.  
12. The rest of the night, silent, maybe a crack in the joists, or the flicker of a bird, the wind, though there’s seldom wind here. And the life of the princess may have gone on endlessly like this, except for the pig. Who was, of course, a prince with a curse on him.
13.  
14. The jailer kept him as a pet. He kept the key chain around the pig’s neck and, at night, when the pig tried to sniff under the princess’s door, the key clinked against the stone. The pig, you see, was a terrible voyeur of fragrance and he thought he smelled a truffle in there.
15.  
16. And so the things that pass are not, after all, what we think they are. Meeting them face to face won’t save us. What saves us is the bed we make for ourselves in the bodies we can’t bring out of the dark. What saves us is the love we think they would have for us if each minute did not have its own direction.