Dylan Thomas Poem by Doren Robbins

Fulfillment is uncomfortable, fulfillment is uncontrollable.
What is it that Dylan Thomas told of a "weather's wind…"
"that through the green fuse drives the flower" drove
his green age-

but maybe it's a kind of holding on
to a stanching force and it rots the expression
in your mouth.

Maybe it doesn't or can't
open without insisting restraint.
The way a lot of people like it.
No wonder.
- The polite passionate poem
inside a constricted throat.
What a fountain throat
he might've had
instead of a packaged mouth
for a fuddled audience.
The half-panting kind.
The dying to stay there,
Some of them
Mystified consumer types.
Such a person
who might've been a wizard eight-hundred years ago
was taken from us.
Not the last on the punitive list.
Is there a punishment for exuberance gene?
Is it a lifelong striving to overcome
a fatal indifference
or a lifelong indifference to overcome
a fatal passion?
No can find. You can die
constricted at both ends.
It doesn't matter if you're into it.
And how do you completely trace it
getting that far out?
The rabbit's eyes dwell
on the fox's paws.
Some people contradict the proverb;
some people can't look at the riddle.
It's the definite sensation,
the way the altered rhythm
of a branch looks bent underwater.
And I walk hard in my own rhythm.

First appeared in Iowa Review