Another Language

The whole world is flat & I am round. Even women avert their eyes, & men, embarrassed by the messy way that life turns into life, look away, forgetting they themselves were once this roundness underneath the heart, this helpless fish swimming in eternity. The sound of O, not the sound of I embarrasses the world. My friends, who voluntarily have made their bodies flat, their writings flat as grief, look at me in disbelief. What is this large unseemly thing- a pregnant poet? an enormous walking O? Oh take all the letters of the alphabet but that! We speak the Esperanto of the flat! Condemned to sign language & silence, pregnant poems for men to snicker at, for women to denounce, I live alone. My world is round & bounded by the mountain of my fear; while all the great geographers agree the world is flat & roundness cannot be.