BUT I STILL GET THE BLUES

"You are the ecstatic type," she says, and I cannot disagree. I was suckled on ecstasy and, at any given moment, I am but three mindful breaths from bliss. I cut my teeth on euphoria; rapture lies at the base of my spine, lurks in my nerve endings, nests in my heart, ready to fly forth unbidden in the midst of my mundane undertakings. I require no changes, attach no conditions, my happiness is not subject to circumstance. Joy is my nature and my abiding, my refuge and my emanation, my shelter on the path to the cessation of suffering. The slightest recollection of grace,        - a crimson feather,           an emerald tendril,               an audacious scilla,               a kitten's kiss arches me with glory, strings me with praise, draws me with devotion to fling volleys of gratitude to the six realms and the ten directions.

IDENTITY People ask what I do and I say I am a poet. Ah, they say, you write poetry.               And here I am,               graced with an occupation,                 a raison d'etre,                   a justification of existence. I see my attachment to this self-image, but what if I am encountering a dry spell, a writer's block? What if I have written nothing for a week, a month, a season? At what point is poet forfeit? How then do I identify myself? The only other role that springs to mind is crone. But how does one go about croning? Surely one does not require a pen and paper and a computer program to save and print the product. What does a crone produce to impress one's peers and gratify one's ego? And, if not crone, what other epithet might I adopt to give me some small purpose, some scintilla of meaning? I am not brave enough to go naked and nameless in the world where one is known, adorned and situated by the attribute of work. Lacking that niche of name, where, then, shall I bind the molecules recruited by memory to the army of myself? I have not the courage to respond with Cordelia's nothing. Nothing will come of nothing, says the king, and I am nothing if not a poet. FLEECED Here I am, three score and ten, and look at the shape I'm in; while I was inside, taking a shower, somebody stole my skin. I left it on a hook beside my towel to keep it warm and dry and someone switched it for this old thing.             I feel like I could cry. They left me this, all lines and wrinkles and blemishes, bumps and bags and something's very wrong with the shape,             where it doesn't bulge, it sags. I would have given the skin off my nose, or even the skin on my teeth, but to make off with the whole of my hide is cruel beyond belief. I have no choice but to wear it,             too long, too thick, too wide, so please look harder than just skin deep, it's really me inside. BOOKS