One more thing (or two or three)

Not supposed to do this
but (Hallie left her iPod in the car this morning as I dropped the girls off at school and so)
I listened,
overhearing some unknown somebody singing in her voice something
I'd never heard:

I’ve made you promises a thousand times
I’ve tried to hear from heaven but I talk the whole time
I think I made you too small, I’ve never feared you at all
If you touched my face would I know you?
Looked into my eyes could I behold you?
What do I know of you who spoke me into motion
Where have I even stood but the shore along your ocean?
Are you fire, are you fury
Are you sacred, are you beautiful
What do I know? What do I know of holy?

which made me feel the same way I felt when eavesdropping on Anne Carson, who, writing among her beautiful pages of poetry, says these other things
(that comprise page 46 of Glass, Irony, and God), that say,
well, you decide:

---
46 ANNE CARSON


God's Woman

Are you angry at nature? said God to His woman.
Yes I am angry at nature I do not want nature stuck
up between my legs on your pink baton

or ladled out like geography whenever
your buckle needs a lick.
What do you mean Creation?

God circled her.
Fire. Time. Fire.
Choose, said God.


God Stiff

God gave an onomatopoeic quality to women's language.
These eternally blundering sounds eternally
blundering down

into the real words of what they are
like feet dropped into bone shoes.
"Treachery" (she notices) sounds just like His zipper going down.

----------

then I remember needing to return a book
(as I sit here between
pages of Aristotle's Rhetoric and morning meetings
knowing I shouldn't listen to anyone
else, yet, and yet) the book
a friend of mine returning from Switzerland found in a chateau;
"I thought you would like to see this," is what I heard as I felt
the lent cover in my hands:
KENNETH L. PIKE Mark my words.

The split of pages 52 and 53 is the male author's overhearing, his
poem about some unknown somebody singing
in her voice something I'd never heard
put this way:

----------

Communication Arc

The thrust of metaphor
cannot be parried
before it meets the mark,
before defence is set.
His parables forced surrender
--or dream of murder.

Steel upon steel,
this time reply in kind:
The Syrophenician woman
knew she didn't own the right
She saw the Power--
and reached the switch
with parable.

Live communication
is parabolic art--and arc.

----------

I'm not listening to
One more thing
(or two or three)
unless you talk with me.