Mouth

your mouth
is a garden in Arabia it is raining

I enter the mountain
under cheekbones like glaciers

your mouth is an old woman weaving
the same blanket

your mouth sits in the sun
dozing, but the fingers of your mouth
weave

birds migrate inside your mouth

when the birds reach the south plain
they are under the mountain

they waken the old woman
who feeds them the crumb of a yarn

Arabia! Arabia! Arabia!

by Donald Hall

In spring 2001 I was standing in the Museum of Modern Art in New York staring at a huge Jackson Pollock canvas of gray and white splotches and suddenly I got it. Not that I understand what this canvas meant the way I understood a Renoir or a Matisse, but suddenly, I found myself enjoying abstract expressionism, a style I had previously referred to as toothbrush painting, like where you take your tooth brush and spray the paint. I didn't need concrete objects and a story line to get a mood story. I could take it like an amorphous dream.

That's recently happened to me with surrealism. I used to hate poems I couldn't understand. My first rule (especially in a workshop/student poem) was I've got to be able to follow what's going on. I still hold that line with beginner poets because they haven't earned my trust. But with big name poets, poets whose other work I've liked, I've started to float along with the dream.

I have tiny ideas about what this poem means--woman as oasis, woman as the center that will hold, the one that weaves it all together--but I don't like it for what it means. I like it for how it makes me feel, like there are worlds in me, ecstatic. I also am fascinated by the craft, how Hall uses repetition and interweaving images to hold the poem together. I'm trying to learn to write like this.