Comparative Literature Department
Student Projects-- Kristin Boettger
Portrait of a Poet
by Kristin Boettger
He scarcely has a background; we don't know from where he comes but it may be the south. Poetry drips from the wall in front of which he stands, the words gathering in useless pools at his feet. His face is drawn steady and calm with a sigh as he works to remove a heavy gold ring --from a finger swollen with age-- which has outlasted many of the worlds which he has juggled in his palms; sliding the ring off is erotic, he thinks, and wishes he had not thought such, though it is typical of this man in this time to think this thing. But without a copy of a book he once wrote and with only the wincing of his eyes to shut out an older age than he had hoped to ever know, because language is youth or at least the love of it is, he cannot interpret any longer what is erotic and what is not, what is symbolic and what is not, what is a metaphor and what is not. He can scarcely remember why he stands posing for this picture and he will not know that his face will fade from black and white to color, for his years will eventually belong to a name and no longer to his hands, which so delicately painted the poetry once long ago in a landscape setting or perhaps in a pub; it matters so little if he liked the sound of war-- the bombs that have sounded are metaphorical now, the bomb in his mind has lessened to a small fire which one of us will douse with a bucket of fresh words from the sink, only to watch as it smolders and its smoke rises to new forms. His coat seems to have once been red, and this we will remember about him without even thinking about it.
