Anne Carson, poet

Pretty much every day, three friends—me, Kim on Kauai, and Sherilyn in either Santa Clara, where she is a caregiver for her father who suffered a serious stroke several years ago, or Burbank, where she is, briefly every week, home with her husband—meet virtually to write, at 7:30 Hawaii time, 9:30 or 10:30 here in California, depending on Standard or Daylight. We meet via WhatsApp, where we call ourselves "Let's Howl!" (the image here is our WhatsApp icon: a photo of Decomposition notebooks). Usually, we greet each other with an emoji of the local weather: a cloud or a sunshine icon, say. We may engage in a bit of conversation. The other morning, Kim greeted us with a  poem. And I thought I'd share it on. It's by Anne Sexton.

The Poet of Ignorance

Perhaps the earth is floating,
I do not know.
Perhaps the stars are little paper cutups
made by some giant scissors,
I do not know.
Perhaps the moon is a frozen tear,
I do not know.
Perhaps God is only a deep voice,
heard by the deaf,
I do not know.

Perhaps I am no one.
True, I have a body
and I cannot escape from it.
I would like to fly out of my head,
but that is out of the question.
It is written on the tablet of destiny
that I am stuck here in this human form.
That being the case
I would like to call attention to my problem.

There is an animal inside me,
clutching fast to my heart,
a huge crab.
The doctors of Boston
have thrown up their hands.
They have tried scalpels,
needles, poison gasses and the like.
The crab remains.
It is a great weight.
I try to forget it, go about my business,
cook the broccoli, open and shut books,
brush my teeth and tie my shoes.
I have tried prayer
but as I pray the crab grips harder
and the pain enlarges.

I had a dream once,
perhaps it was a dream,
that the crab was my ignorance of God.
But who am I to believe in dreams?