by Richard Denner

There's an angel in the park chasing leaves. Another angel on the corner, talking on the phone. An angel making a copy of an article from the New Yorker turns and speaks to me. "What is that you have? It's beautiful."

"It's the cover for a chapbook of my poems, Talking Trash."

"Can I get on your mailing list or something?"

"Well, I guess you can be a part of my small audience."

"I'm a writer, too. I've been working on a novel, but I don't have a publisher. I don't know what I’m going to do."

She has auburn hair, features I like, a delicate face, a bright expression to the eyes, not wearing a wedding ring, casual clothes, a sweater with a heavy knit yet revealing the contour of her breasts, loose fitting trousers, sensible shoes. Venus rising from the sea foam in her invisible clothes.

"I'm surfacing," she says.

"I can see that," I say.

I'm trying to make my best impression. I know I'm liable to download too much, so I try to pace myself, yet she is excited and finds space in my sentences to interject herself and express her view.

"What do you do with your books? Sell them?"

"I sell some, when I give a reading. Give them to friends, trade other poets for books of theirs. Mostly, it's a way to finish my poems, to get them out there, so they're not stuck in a drawer in my desk or in a box in the attic, to complete the circle, and at the same time it forces me to edit and make the poems stand up on their own, so when I stand up to read them, I stand by them with conviction."

"There are readings at Lucy's every third Sunday at 3 p.m."

"What's that? Where is it?"

"It's the café next to the theater down the street."

"Have you read there before?"

"No, I've never read before strangers before. Among friends. In the classroom. I read one time in a class at San Francisco State, a long time ago, and I must have said something to remind some of them of having been in the insane asylum, and they came completely unglued. I don't know what I did. I must've hit a chord of some kind."

"That's kind of the idea. To touch the audience out there."

"I know, but I wasn't expecting that kind of reaction."

"Like reading the Bible in jail and commanding the inmates to repent, and they start banging on the bars with their cups."

"Or your own version of the fear. I'm afraid of getting caged in."

I've been waiting for her to give me a phrase to prompt me to write an inscription in her copy of my book. I say, "Let me write something for you here. What's your name?"

"The Mysterious Woman. Some call me Muse."

So, I write, "Oh Muse, not to be caged in/except by friendship."

She writes; I write; everything is written in our eyes. Dialogue developing; cut to the chase. Nectar starts to drip; time expands; space swirls and opens. We're waving our arms, talking a mile a minute. We're drawing attention to ourselves in the copy shop by our antics.

"So, what did you read in your class?"

"I can't remember, something political. Sexual politics. Today, it wouldn't matter. You could sleep with an elephant and no one would say anything. But then..."

"It's the fear of rejection. It takes a pro to feel safe in their skin, naked, before an audience. I watched Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer last night. Powerful. At the end, there is a scene where he is with his daughter looking out at an empty theater, and he speaks about his life on the stage. I mean, Olivier is one of the greatest, and he's playing this tatty, old musical actor to perfection, and he remembers an important event in his life, a moment which makes him feel that if there ever was a moment where he had a belief in the strength of the human race, it was hearing by chance an old negress sing her heart out about Jesus- 'just making a pure, a natural noise'- that he would have been alright as a person if he could just once have 'lifted his bosom and made such a fuss.' He's definitely down on himself and is trying to live up to a life of failed hopes and faded dreams. He says, 'When you're up here (meaning the stage), you think you love all those people out there, but you don't.' He says his 'face can split open' and he can pretend to be human, sing and tell stories, but that it doesn't matter, behind his eyes he's as dead as the 'shoddy lot out there.' This is kind of nihilistic, and I'm kind of getting off track. I guess what I'm trying to say is that poetry is more than entertainment, and you can't just rely on technique to keep down the fear and trembling. A drama coach told me to turn the nervousness into excitement. Infect the audience with anticipation that something grand is about to happen rather than transmitting your fear that the experience will be dreadful If they perceive you as nervous, they feel it too. If they feel you're confident, then that's what they feel. Beyond this, there's only the raw exposure of your soul."

"I know...I look up there, and I'm glad I'm not in his shoes."

"What size shoe do you wear?" I put my foot next to hers. We do a funny little side step and giggle. This is getting intense.

"This is getting intense," I say.

Tree planter, publisher of dPress chapbooks, longtime owner and operator of Fourwinds Bookstore & Cafe, dharma student, and presently and presently a California-poet-in-the-schools.

Further information and poetry can be found at: www.sonic.net/~rychard/

rychard@sonic.net