http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123065247

NPR- story about man with transplanted heart

Probing the Question

My good professor friend once posed the question,

Would you lie for the sake of the poem?

I replied what good would be in that, the word is mighty powerful.

He asked, What is that guys like you and me are after? What do you think
we're putting in our time for, what is it that we are trying to do?

I hesitated and muttered sheepishly To tell the truth, word for word,
and tell the tale no else has heard.

To that he said, That's a fine & good answer, what's been fed to you to spit back.
But if that's all there is then details really don't matter. Go and be a philosopher.

Because there's a thousand people who've heard a thousand stories
just as many as you can tell. And yet, the poem will survive no matter which
way you tell it, whatever its spin.

That's why we have copy printers & zip disks, so no matter what you come up with, there will always be a spare.

But the font will shift when you're not looking, when it's restless & irritable,
It will scoff at you like the lover who outclasses you,
it will ask to see other people so it can experience other avenues &
give you you the age old line, if you love me you'll set me free & I might come back to you.

It will tire of your moralizing, your rigidity, your thinking in the box,
it will imagines vistas for itself, possibilities
that you have failed to see from lack of discipline.

Then, with the desparation of losing your grip on it forever,
you will begin to make up new names for it, you will teach it foreign tongues,
you will dress up with flowery speeches , cover its cheeks with thick rouge,

And prop dark glasses over the lines of its face.
& then, my friend you will LIE for the sake of the poem,
lie for the SAKE of the poem, and whether it kills you to see it live without you,

whether you scream through the doors it keeps opening for you,
or you take up the bottle again, promise it a villa in the Greek isles but

that thing will live without you, and will find life after you & for THAT, you will lie for the sake of poem,
because the lie is the sacrifice, because someone did it for you, & others may need to hear that lie,

More than you need to hear what you've always known was true.

writ.

It should be noted that the poem
came before the poet,
somewhere in the public registry.
They should place asterisks, write
in felt-tipped pens, or exchange fiction
for bold-faced, or italicized facts
in encyclopedias, not only to be streamlined
into the philosopher’s endless jabber,
but plain wisdom, like the sand bars,
or the egret or the daffodil, the stalagmite
maybe or your grandmother’s canned
beets, swirling in a sour sauce.

The message, likely, has been in stones,
predating the hieroglyph or the rune,
it has been reinvented with each set sun,
or eroded with the brine & granite.
It has staggered down the cobblestone rows,
black blood scabbed on its lips,
while the maggot preserved it through
the straights of plague, avarice
& brides undeserving of its love, & still
besmirched by the jewels which
might have stained it to gold worth
less than the leather of a pauper.

You that own its veins, never ask
to cauterie your wounds: your blood holds firm,
and you should be awake when
your messenger arrives with the mail,
you should startle at the code of the letters
In its address, the sound of it slipping through
the slot; you should hold all incoming calls.
Draw the blinds, wrap a drape around your bones,
and beat eggs & butter in celebration of its arrival.

Don’t be afraid to wander outside the city walls,
buy horses, the prize, thrifty ones, born to flight,
or a gondola with demons to its bow, a pack of dogs,
Don’t even be afraid to take the tarp to the inlet
off the mainland, forgo the pallbearers,
your disappearance may go unnoticed for weeks,
Maybe you will not need the ferryman,
or warm clothes, sweaters & mysterious cloaks:
go where the message drags you— if you’re lucky
enough you will find her naked & amnesiac,
her breast swelled out for the torso.
Her lips longing for medicine, her wrists
poised for the wrench of your bloodletting.

You will know it as a throng, a hum
through your nerves, like the scorpio unmooned,
Like a sting through your heart,
It will not relent: it will remain with you
through your molting, through the cancer of seasons;
It is rising through you, even as her loins may offend,
You have chosen to love her nonetheless,
because you are greedier than the hotel bill
might suggest, more savage than when the maids
come to clean, when you’ve broken her hips
because she asked you to, you will grab her hair
and huddle between her thighs until the lights
go out from the tone of her passion.
It is like that when you have reached her hemisphere.
It is even unlike the sexy mysteries of the moon.

Somehow, you should have known that the message
was speaking to you coming out of the womb,
stretching your mother’s loins, hungry
for the basting of light, the sterling sound of the world,
The angry or curious voices colliding
with the novelty of anything but your own heartbeat;
your message was first heard in that heartbeat,
The same sounds as your body coming into itself,
It was the persuasion that you move into the electricity
of all that breathes, joining the conversation
of so many other voices, as whales, as the sea,
as the lightning, and moons, all dreaming with you,
amid the ceremonies for the dead, the script
of scrolls which will edge you through the nightmare.
The physical terror of walking on your feet,
The stark horror that the mortician will clean the blood
from the flesh of your extinguished skin.
After the rage of your extinguished skin.

There is a theme in the incredible message
that the poem came before the poet is a relief,
like the jolt of an airline, the ambuscade of winter,
like the air raid of sleep, the burn of holy wine,
Like the angle of a swan dive, the first cut & scar,
That we overlap with the race of the poem to its death,
that we are the skin & stink of this incredible message,
It is an exchange of breath with that unutterable thing.