This deliberately cultivated torment for the sake of art is…the only plausible reason for Yeats’ 28-year fruitless pursuit of the Irish revolutionary leader Maud Gonne
– “The Muses of WB Yeats,” Irish America, January 2011
For you she was past-participle, stoked wood, and séance. Smote, and half-melted candles. For you she was material. Reams and reams of pimped-out paper, pretty parchment to catch the glare from a creature-face. She was to mold. And set. And stiffen. Passed out ingénue, persiflage. Pun. And Punishment. Swept under foyer rugs, a scene-change, a sea- change, exited left from every foreign stage. She was legion. Caustic smile. Muse. She was reservoir receptacle empty space to field your ghost grasps, aching orifice, notion of a minefield. She was metaphor. She was suggestion. She was body-of-land and sweet projection. She was soil that spit at you each time you tried to plant your flag. She was Mother- Country. Ireland. She was the analog of “spirit,” she was away from you. You called her Mother. She was fire and femme and burning flags and tapered wax; libel encouragement of three-dozen letters notwithstanding, she might have been free of you, had she ever been free of you; how could she be free of you? Siphoned into language, she was the stuff of matter: words like “world” and “book” and—curtain call—“astonishment.” She was particle physics sans particle. In art as in physics, to be loved she doth refused. Refused paternal rites of passage, snuffboxes, house-slippers, the desire to be “known.” She was not loved. She was beloved. She was romanticism ad infinitum, until her face was blue. But she was not romantic. A compendium of foisted superficialities: an actor’s spell. Sanguine contortion. Of all the ways you loved her, but did not love her. Of all the ways you wished for her, but did not want her. You dreamed of her constantly – silly things – all thread and tapestry she eggshell-tiptoed not to unravel. Her divertissement was a thousand small rejections, to stave off the big refusal. Her deception. Your shallowness. Art propelled not by meanings, but by illusions. Left, left unsure whom or what to blame…
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 2.
Camille Carter is a writer, poet, educator, and traveler. She currently lives in Harlem, Montana, where she teaches at Aaniiih Nakoda College on the Fort Belknap Reservation. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, SWWIM, The American Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, The MacGuffin, Cherry Tree, and Broad River Review.
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