Friday In A Small Town Poem by Leah Ayliffe

When I was young I had the important realization that good and evil is not the natural tension in the psyche; is instead an external condition, something merely dealt with in the field of our incarnation. For the inner world of our energies and possibilities, the natural tension - which the poets, saints, shamans, and my lovers since have explained to me - is between fear and desire. Then I could grasp why love itself was pain, why my throat still burns. When all the bandits that you turn your other cheek to All lay down their bandanas and complain And you want somebody you don't have to speak to Won't you come see me, Queen Jane? (Bob Dylan)

This is a vignette with sharp, specific, striking images of small town existence. But Friday night lasts about five hours - then it's the rest of the weekend, another 15 hours or so with friends; then the work/school week. Does the elated mood of Friday stay with throughtout the week, or is the week a low energytime. Iwonder because I cant tell if this is the remembrance of a privileged moment of joie de vivre 0r if it characterizes her life.(Sadly, I think the joy ls intense but short.) As such this is a kind of memory poem countless poets have written as a witness to what is special but very brief.(Mallarme's poem AFTERNOON OF A FAUN - I only know it in translation - is supposedly a DIFFICULT POEM. It's not. You have the essence of it right here in FRIDAY IN A SMALL TOWN. The opening line shows the goal of such a poem I WOULD PERPETUATE THESE NYMPHS, says the Faun, but he finds he cannot. How do you make joie de vivre a steady state? You can't. By its nature it is transient and sequential. That's the conundrum of the symbolist faun and the realist girl. You could write a sequel and spell that out, or leave it as this tantalizing and open-ended celebration. This poem set off a train of summer thoughts in me...