I AM MICHAEL DERRICK HUDSON:
Forgive, please, my slightly archaic diction, my floralities,
my fedoral syntax, my apiary japes. I don’t know any better.
All of my English comes from Robert Browning—or Frost?
I can never quite remember which. Thus: clastigloss, fractured,
not-quite-right, which is my complaint about the world.
Have you spent any time looking at the world lately?
I have. I use a microscope, because I fucking love I Fucking
Love Science. I look at bees and I look at flowers. (These are
the traditional subjects of poet-scholars.) The thing about bees
and flowers is that they need each other and they don’t have
any use for me. All that Gaudi architecture of vegetable love
and chitinous twerk and I mayn’t live in it. Pity me, marooned
on this chalk-dry isle of Man. I: Adam manque, pale macaque,
Eve-less, Crusoe-fied, clutching my futile Q-tip, my lonely pen—
where brown bees murmur, but will not murmur to me. I know
I am no flower, nor was meant to bumblebee, though white men,
I hear, are the animals with the most venomous sting. Though we
have rendered every Caesar and whale in the try-works of time
and produced, thereby, a quantity of ink. Though we have named
the beasts of field and sea. Though we have tasted them all,
have cooked them all, with molecular gastronomy. They will not
pollinate me: I should have been a woman, or Chinese.
—Poets Respond
September 13, 2015
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Sam Cha: “Despite the title of the poem, and my Korean surname, I am really not Michael Derrick Hudson. I am actually a person.” (website)
