Poetry of Issue #7        Page 2

The Beard of D. H. Lawrence

The beard of D. H. Lawrence fits me poorly. It doesn’t drape like a Dior gown or conceal like an African mask. The hooks that hook over my ears are fishhooks, the barbs the tiniest of insults. The fuzz of the beard itches like a woolen nightmare. Lawrence found his work erotic, tainted by original sin. He liked original sin, or at least wrote as if he did. I picture him at dusk in a seedy mining town in the midlands. The purple streak in the sky flatters his mood. He trudges up a cinder road toward a row of bleak stone houses. No thatch, only warped shingles, some flapping in the north wind. He believes in himself the way a tortoise does, slow and vigilant. I want to live in the landscape of Sons and Lovers. I want to mate slowly like the elephant and bear a book of terrible omens. Not a novel of sleek men and women having sex in ruined factories. Not a novel in which an elegant lady lifts her skirts. No, a book of gnarled and mossy dramas, slogging through mud and shallow water to reach places where strange animals breed, groaning and howling with pleasure. The beard doesn’t fit, but maybe it will later, when I’ve written that dreary book and doomed its readership to dreams of hot summer marsh.