Beggar
Just one!
I begged the Muse.
You again?
Always the same
schtick.
If you want the line,
you’ll have to earn it.
How?
Write about something
besides younger men,
Muse said.
Think of Elizabeth Bishop,
who spent twenty years
on “The Moose.”
No! I won’t!
Too late. I was already
minding my
mousse
au
chocolat.
Copyright © 2020 by Marilyn Kallet. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 10, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
“Don’t poets crave the taste of language in our mouths, on our tongues? When the speaker of ‘Beggar’ pleads for a line, there’s an almost-physical hunger at play. The inner critic, the ‘Muse,’ tries to stave off predictability. But the ardent speaker of ‘Beggar’ deflects the intellectual in favor of oral pleasure, plunges into dessert! That taste of chocolate in the last line surprised me as I wrote this playful love poem, but I’m guessing it would not have surprised Freud!”
—Marilyn Kallet
Marilyn Kallet
Marilyn Kallet’s most recent book of poems is How Our Bodies Learned (Black Widow Press, 2018). A Professor Emerita at the University of Tennessee, she leads poetry residencies in Auvillar, France, for the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts and is serving her second term as poet laureate of Knoxville.