Richard Krause
People Pry
People pry like awls. What you have to do is seal up your crevices. Not even let the least crack of daylight give them a hint of where they can place their instrument. You remain shut like a clam. And though they get angry and chip your shell, with every ounce of muscle you remain closed. And maybe finally they do gain admission. First by that false opening, the mock fenestration that chips the shell leaving a clear green mesentery. But you refuse to show your internal workings. You leave such a confusion that they don't know your eyes from the proverbial hole in the ground. This angers them, this seeming internal confusion. But you take pride in that false fenestration, that mock window that allows them to see into nothing, but rather reflects them. And even when they pull out their knife and slip the sharpest blade through the crack only the chip gave access to you remain stubbornly, as triumphantly closed as when they work the knife completely around to sever your taut muscle, sever it so that the shell springs open and with one or two scrapings you are eviscerated, insides scrambled on the sand, and there is nothing to you for all their efforts. They pick you up with the tip of their knife, examine what they were so intent on opening with their blade, but nothing, still you don't expose the eye you see them with. Still your internal conformation is as much of a mystery as when you were closed tight. Frustrated they take the heel of their boot and stamp you into the sand with their toe pointing upwards. People pry like awls. They must. For who else would degrade themselves compared to their remote ancestor the eagle who soars with the mystery he can't understand, and drops it from a height he can.
The Tea Ceremony
It has just occurred to me that making love is just the opposite of the tea ceremony. Or if they were to be the same the cups would have to be snatched out of the participants' hands and shattered on those large stones found outside the tea room in Japanese gardens. The hot tea would be spattered over the colorful kimonos. The server would have her powdered tea container upset in a small cloud of green dust. The bamboo whisk brush would fall on the tatami and roll in the corner. The hanging scroll over the small alcove would be pulled down in the effort to get hold of the kimono. Everyone else would have fled. Finally you'd unloosen the obi and undrape the kimono and after completely undoing the long swirls of the most colorful material you would have overcome the idea of diametrical opposites and merged the tea ceremony with lovemaking.
Talent
To have talent that spills over every effort. That you are surfeited on every side. That every turning wastes. What to do. The less prudent build reservoirs, try to contain. Their talent stagnates behind genres. Has lines drawn around it like roast beef, has the fleet foot bound. The overabundance achieves rhyme hobbling. Achieves beat. What ran fluid and free is put in a watercourse. Locked in chapters, or harnessed in scenes it wears like a bridle or worse an oxbow around the neck. The talent ceases to course, the mane no longer trails in the wind. The elflocks on the feet no longer trail in freedom. They are clipped not to interfere with the heaviest of shoes--work shoes. Not to create anew but to furrow and deepen what is. To plant, reap and sow. It is the animal husbandry of talent. The farming of it out of the wilds, finally the marketing of it, that sells.
