These days everyone wonders if Daphne was a secret binger, embarrassed by her appetites.  With eyes only for her lean flight, Apollo wouldn’t suspect but might have sensed her full potential:

 

                                    rigid, rippled bark

                                    vertical alligator

                                    mouth open to sky

 

We can still almost taste Marilyn’s flesh through diaphanous fabric,

 

                                    witness what is sweet,

                                    white pear, flayed, laid open

                                    on a picnic cloth

 

Where do I fall between these women?  Daimons are a girl’s best friend.

 

                                    Make me a siren,

                                    bird without wings, I’ll keep

                                    singing the danger.

 

As Cassandra, I speak the truth always.

 

                                    Apollo again,

                                    foiled, curses and gives his gifts,

                                    the stripped laurel wreaths

 

trumping with his many alimonies the women he has chased away.

 

Know thyself!  I am as much Apollo as Daphne or Cassandra.  I am the soul of man as well as woman.  I love justice more than the Furies,

 

                                    black flies of summer

                                    so busy stinging sorry

                                    flesh, red swollen tongues

 

they do not stop to savor the blood they suck.

 

And why blame Medusa for the power she did not seek?  Imagine how she loved Perseus for showing her to her/self!

 

                                    Beauty eternal,

                                    face remembered for its shield

                                    of shimmering peace

 

I do not wish to punctuate the haiku, only the prose, but sometimes I do.  Clarity is native to me.

 

                                    Narcissus beside

                                    the pond.  It is so easy

                                    to confuse the self

 

for its reflection in still water.  And now the zodiac, Pisces, the twin fish, the yin yang of who I am, a human who breathes underwater, a body mutable and alive, a being back and forth in being, doing nothing.  Back and a typo, froth!

 

Every poem is a portrait of its maker, even the persona poem, says Dr. Apollo Fudd.  Even the daimon haibun.

 

When I was Hagar in the desert, the angel came to me

 

                                    a gushing fountain

                                    sprung phallic from the raw sand

                                    as Adam from clay

 

When I was Lazarus

 

                                    Jesus dragged me out

                                    but Sylvia got to me

                                    first, resurrected

 

and as rotten with perfection as any man since Kenneth Burke!

 

When I was Madonna

 

                                    I reinvented

                                    myself over and over

                                    first as Marilyn

 

                                    of cotton boll hair

                                    reeking with sweat and sex but

                                    still like a virgin

 

like Mary, Mother of God, reading a book until the angel pointed his lily at her and said, “Procreate”

 

and since I can’t fuck every man who wants me or have so many children I won’t know what to do, I must take the damned lily and write, dipping its slanted tip in the fresh blood of the black flies, in the gushing fountain, procreating all these bloody invisible poems.

 

Some days I am overcome by the anonymity of it all, the Emily daimon, watching the already made man say whatever drivel he wants in print.

                                   

Oh, it doesn’t stop here.  That’s not the definitive reply to the situation.  And I’m a man, too, as I said before, in person and in daimon.  I am as much Walt as Emily, lifting the bloody bodies in the field, writing their tender letters home.  Why shouldn’t I be?

 

                                    And I am Judas

                                    so full of love for Jesus

                                    I’d pay the full price

 

of eternal damnation just to see him live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live and live

 

OK, enough of that, you get the lily point.