Secrecy
Secrecy flows through you,
a different kind of blood.
It’s as if you’ve eaten it
like a bad candy,
taken it into your mouth,
let it melt sweetly on your tongue,
then allowed it to slide down your throat
like the reverse of uttering,
a word dissolved
into its glottals and silibants,
a slow intake of breath—
And now it’s in you, secrecy.
Ancient and vicious, luscious
as dark velvet.
It blooms in you,
a poppy made of ink.
You can think of nothing else.
Once you have it, you want more.
What power it gives you!
Power of knowing without being known,
power of the stone door,
power of the iron veil,
power of the crushed fingers,
power of the drowned bones
crying out from the bottom of the well.
***
Hi Friends,
Today’s poem, written by the prolific Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood, comes from the August 28, 2006 issue of The New Yorker.
Challenge for the day: find me another poem that gets away with as many clichés as Atwood pulls here. I’m sure it’s out there; I just can’t think of it at this moment. Or, if you disagree, make an argument for why Atwood doesn’t actually pull off some or all of the cliché images in “Secrecy.”
As a reminder, April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you missed any poem-a-days from earlier, you can catch up here at meetmein811.blogspot.com or at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/poemaday_tgifreytag.
You can also always learn more about National Poetry Month or sign up for a more official-like poem-a-day list at www.poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.
Enjoy.
Ellen