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ample-sliced, a great old pie atop your head!
Be the world. Do not deny our fascination
lies in its filth, the maggot's sweet diet.
Marvel at the corrupt! Make disgust your
lust and cast your fresh pain to the trash!
The sounds of these lines, a buoyant, imperative music, have their counterpart in the similarly buoyant images: for example, the "apple hat" that is "a great old pie atop your head," adorned with hatpin-betrayals. Sharp yet attractive, old junk yet glamorous, the imaginary hat is characteristic. The repeated action of expelling or discarding and the final noun "trash" make a counter-energy to the directive to embrace or accept. As in the poems by Hopkins and Yeats, opposed or contradictory energies must be combined, when the goal is, as Marvin says in the last stanza, to "Be the world."
(Cate Marvin's poem "Love the Contagion" is from her new book, "Fragment of the Head of the Queen: Poems." Sarabande. Copyright 2007 by Cate Marvin.)
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