Jody's Notes
Annoying as it is to admit this, I have to: this is one of my favorite poems. For an odd reason, I think: Because I rarely get to say what I think in a poem. To make a poem work: to make the imagery I've generated fit well with a narrative and a sensibility usually means that what I think (and feel) gets left behind. But not in this poem.
Another thing that I get a kick out of is that the poem has a rather intricate "subtext"--as a pattern of images that tie together below the surface (as it were) used to be called. And it's a subtext that I didn't put there deliberately but discovered was there after I'd written the poem.
That's a nice experience. Because there's an illusion generated that you're not all on your own, that you don't have to do this all by yourself--that something invisible is actually helping you along. When you write. It's a nice illusion; it makes the act of writing feel a little less lonely.
I reprinted the poem in The Lust for Blueprints.
Hungry for control, the dangfool god
gouges his own eye out
and drops it in the seedy well.
Then he gulps down the thick stew
Mimir has ladled out for him: pond scum,
decomposing bird … not pure by a long shot
but the usual for neglected wells.
“I don’t think I’m any smarter,” Odin says,
the throbbing in his esophagus finally subsiding.
Mimir shrugs and counsels patience.
Sure enough, at dawn some days later,
there is dew for the first time.
Those awake at such an hour wonder
what large thing has spent the night crying.
And some centuries hence, Christians
will suspect dewdrops are angel-eggs.
But for Odin they are new eyes,
and he sees the dawn
from everywhere at once.
© 1991, 2001 Jody Azzouni